The Kasama article claims that this “green light” is actually the purpose and main point of the whole article. Fortunatly, however, Kasama is honest enough to reprint the statement so that it can be read in full. I’m sure any honest reader, upon reading the entire statement (which is much longer than this “hidden” sentence) will get what the real point is.

I began my brief talk by saying that our position was based on two principles: First, it was based on an understanding that the class character of the United States is imperialist, that is, that it is ruled by the monopoly capitalist class and in the interests of that class, and that this character cannot and will not miraculously change over night through an election, despite many people’s hopes to contrary. Second, it was based on an understanding of the mass line. On the one hand, we have an understanding that it is the people who make history, and not the politicians. On the other hand, we understand that people are paying attention to and engaging elections as their main form of political engagement during an electoral period, and that revolutionaries have to engage people where they are at rather than at where we would like for them to be.

Following these fundamental points, it becomes clear that revolutionaries who are actually engaged in mass organizing with broad forces in trade unions, the student movement, and so on, must actually say something about elections. We could say simply, “don’t vote for the bourgeois candidates”, but what would be the point? Most people who care about politics are going to go vote, and as much as they would be interested in our opinions on Libya, they would also be interested in our opinions on what to do in the voting booth. “Who, then, are the people’s candidates that we should vote for?” they will ask. To this, we don’t have a real answer.

Then there’s the question of why. In my brief talk in Brussels, I tried to emphasize the point that we wanted to elevate people’s consciousness through struggle, beginning where people are and summing things up as we go forward together. We advocated defeating McCain as a way of engaging people’s progressive political views, and we took the advanced to protest outside of the RNC to emphasize that the power to change the course of history lies in the streets with the people rather than in the conventional hall. As our pamphlet on the Mass Line puts it:

We hold that it is through these particular battles that people learn about the nature of the enemy, how this system works and what are the effective methods of struggle. This in turn allows us to: Land blows which weaken and confuse the enemy while winning all that can be won; to accumulate forces for future battles (i.e. to build the respective movements by raising the general level of organization and consciousness) and to create favorable conditions for people to take up revolutionary theory.

Despite the setbacks that came as a result of the attacks from the FBI, certainly we accomplished the goals as best we could given the conditions before us, and the FRSO is certainly stronger now than ever before. The line put into practice at that time has been proven correct in practice.

This election cycle, we of course find that the same Marxist-Leninist principles hold true. What’s the real point of the statement on the 2012 elections?

We think the conditions are right in this electoral cycle to emphasize instead the nature of the two party, one ruling class system and talk about why what we have is not democracy and not good enough. We do think it is still important for progressives to go to the polls to oppose concrete attacks on democratic rights, such as Voter ID and anti-gay amendments. In terms of voting in the presidential election, it is better to vote against Romney, especially in swing states. In other states like California, the Republicans are unlikely to win. In these cases, it would be positive to have a strong third party vote total.

Our main message is that no matter how hopeful we are for change to come through electoral politics, this is not the venue for real change. Citizens United, and its ruling that corporations are free to openly buy the allegiance of politicians, makes more clear what has always been true: those who have the gold, make the rules. During this particular election cycle progressives should emphasize and talk about the problems inherent in the system, while placing demands on politicians from both parties. Our faith and our future are in the people’s struggle, not the ballot box.

Simple enough, one would think. See you in the streets at the RNC and the DNC.

Los Angeles, CA – On June 5, 2012 Carlos Montes’ criminal court prosecution ended in a victory for Carlos and the movement.

Carlos Montes’ home was raided on May 17, 2011, by the combined forces of the LA County Sheriff’s Swat Team and the FBI, by crashing his door down at 5:00 a.m., with automatic assault rifles drawn, almost killing him. He was charged with 6 serious felonies with a possible jail time of up to 18 years.

With local and national support, via solidarity protests, call-in campaigns to President Obama and U.S. Attorney General Holder, local rallies and protests, and an offensive legal strategy, two felonies were dropped – this was a first partial victory. However the District Attorney still stated that they wanted Montes to do at least 5 years in state prison for the 4 felony charges remaining.

The local and national Committees to Stop FBI Repression launched a petition drive and a “Call the D.A.” campaign, with phone banking and a robo call by Carlos to over 4 000 supporters, urging folks to call District Attorney Steve Cooley. The D.A.’s office was flooded with calls and letters.

Montes’ attorney made several motions to get charges dropped on various grounds, but the Los Angeles Superior Court judge rejected them. Preparations were made for a trial, knowing well the state judicial system is not ‘fair and impartial.’ Montes and his attorney Jorge Gonzalez got widespread support and media coverage including in the Democracy Now TV show, La Opinion and the Guardian UK newspaper.

The local D.A. on the case then sought for a resolution and proposed to drop three additional felonies, if Carlos pled “no contest” to one count of perjury. This proposal included no jail time, three years of probation and community service. Under advice from supporters, friends and his attorney Montes moved forward with this proposal.

This is a victory for Carlos Montes and the movement against police political repression. A trial had the danger of him being convicted of four felonies with jail time and the additional old felony – a total of 5 felonies. At this point Carlos is out of jail, will continue to organize against repression, for public education, against U.S.-led wars and for immigrant rights. He is already planning to attend the protest at the Republican National Convention on August 27, 2012 in Tampa, Florida.

Next steps: The local committee with supporters and rank-and-file members of SEIU 721 will hold a victory party to thank everyone who worked on this campaign and to help pay off legal expenses. It is set for Saturday, June 23, 7:00 p.m. Details will follow.

Carlos wants to thank all the people, organizations, unions and community people who worked and supported him in this struggle against police/political repression.

The struggle continues to defend the 23 other anti-war and international solidarity activists who are STILL under an FBI investigation for showing solidarity with the oppressed people of the world, especially the Palestinian and Colombian people. Stay updated via: www.stopfbi.net!

]]>https://marxistleninist.wordpress.com/2012/06/05/victory-against-repression-carlos-montes-court-case-ends-in-victory/feed/0comradezeroforsaleReport from Montes’ court today – Trial moved to June 20https://marxistleninist.wordpress.com/2012/05/15/report-from-montes-court-today-trial-moved-to-june-20/
https://marxistleninist.wordpress.com/2012/05/15/report-from-montes-court-today-trial-moved-to-june-20/#commentsWed, 16 May 2012 01:50:53 +0000http://marxistleninist.wordpress.com/?p=6735Continue reading →]]>The following report from the Los Angeles Committee to Stop FBI Repression is from the email list of the National Committee to Stop FBI Repression.

Carlos Montes trial moved to June 20, due to new developments

Statement from the LA Committee to Stop FBI Repression

Carlos Montes and supporters at court

Los Angeles, CA – Over 100 supporters rallied in front of the Los Angeles Superior Court today, May 15, to demand, “Drop the charges against Carlos Montes.” The supporters included MECHA students, union members, teachers, vendors and community members as well as activists from the anti-war movement.

“With your help we will win this case,” Montes told the crowd. “The repression against me is an attack on all of our movements. Thank you all for your solidarity! Together we will win!”

Following this strong showing of solidarity, supporters then moved in to the packed courtroom. Montes was set for trial. Due to a new development in the case, the trial was moved to Wednesday, June 20, 2012. The new development deals with obtaining information needed to clarify the legal record. The defense lawyer, Montes, and the district attorney agreed to the June 20 date, to give enough time to investigate this information that would help defeat this attack against Montes and our movement.

The struggle continues, we will continue to demand “drop the charges” and await the new findings that will clear the charges, if not we go to trial on June 20.

Carlos Montes is facing multiple felony charges because the FBI claims he is a felon in violation of firearm codes. The FBI claim stems from a 1969 student strike for Black, Chicano and Women’s studies at East L.A. College, where police beat and arrested demonstrators. Montes was arrested on his way home from the protest, accused of assaulting a sheriff’s deputy (with an empty soda can). This charge was sentenced as a misdemeanor according to a recently uncovered court document. District Attorney Steve Cooley, under the guidance of the FBI, is basing his case on this 42-year-old misdemeanor, disguising it as a bogus felony. Without a past felony, all of the charges Montes is facing, relating to his legally purchased firearms, would be dismissed. Both sides agree that no prison time whatsoever was served in the 1969 incident. The legal process is being driven by something other than the facts of the case. It is political repression.

“In the weeks ahead we need to keep putting pressure on the District Attorney to drop the charges,” states Mick Kelly of the Committee to Stop FBI Repression. “The prosecution of Carlos Montes is part of a broader attack by the FBI and local police on anti-war and international solidarity activists. We need to do everything in our power to push back.”

Salt Lake City, UT – FBI agents are harassing anti-war and anti-NATO organizers as the big protest against the U.S.-led NATO military alliance approaches on Sunday, May 20, in Chicago. On May 11, Gregory Lucero’s mother awoke him in their family home, saying, “The FBI is here and would like to speak to you.” Lucero came downstairs to find three FBI agents, two white men and a white woman, who wanted to ask him questions about the upcoming protest against NATO.

Lucero is a founding member of the Revolutionary Students’ Union, a group with four Utah chapters affiliated nationally with Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). In the past year he joined the Freedom Road Socialist Organization and is organizing to raise enough money to caravan across the country to the protest against NATO and the G8 in Chicago.

Lucero said, “I was very tired because I spent hours the day before phone banking in support of veteran Chicano leader and anti-war activist Carlos Montes in Los Angeles. Carlos Montes is going on trial this coming Tuesday, May 15. I was up late because I spoke at an immigrant rights meeting about the FBI frame-up of Carlos Montes.”

In response to a question about what to do when the FBI comes knocking, Gregory Lucero advises, “I think it is wise not to speak to the FBI, to give them the name of a lawyer they can contact, and to then ask them to leave. Nothing good can come from speaking to the FBI. They have a proven record of entrapping activists.”

The FBI agents asked questions about organizations and the people involved with them, but Lucero refused to give any names. They asked about the protest against NATO in Chicago and who was going to it. Lucero said, “It’s not our job to turn in other activists to the police. It’s harassment of the crudest kind and we should avoid talking to the police about our organizations.”

For many, this ongoing harassment of activists and organizers is something new, but for veteran activists it is the revival of repression seen in the 1950s and 1960s. U.S. government repression by the FBI and other agencies is expanding as the Occupy movement and protests against war and poverty are on the increase.

This FBI intimidation is related to 23 anti-war and international solidarity activists and Carlos Montes, raided by the FBI last year. The activists formed a group called Committee to Stop FBI Repression (www.StopFBI.net). When asked what he thinks the FBI is up to, Lucero said, “I think the FBI is harassing me because I fight for immigrant rights and educations rights, and they are ramping up harassment to intimidate activists to not go to Chicago and protest NATO on May 20. They are trying to get activists to give information about other groups and activists so they can incriminate and frame up people.”

Los Angeles, CA – The Committee to Stop FBI Repression has created a great new video on the life of Carlos Montes, and the fight to beat back the attempt to jail him.

Montes is a veteran Chicano activist known for his leadership of the 1968 East Los Angeles student walkouts, the historic Chicano Moratorium against the U.S. war in Vietnam, and the recent immigrants’ rights mega-marches of 2006. Montes was a co-founder of the Brown Berets. In recent years he has be active in the anti war, Chicano, labor and immigrant rights movements. He currently one of the 24 anti war and international solidarity activists who have been targeted by the FBI, and is scheduled to go on trial May 15.

The video urges people to call Los Angeles District Attorney Steve Cooley, at 213-974-3512 to demand that all charges against Montes be dropped.

“Everyone should see this video and share it with their friends. It‘s the inspiring story of a heroic activists, Carlos Montes, who facing an FBI frame up. We can’t let him go to prison,” says Jess Sundin of the Committee to Stop FBI Repression.

The FBI has known about him since his days as a cage-rattling Chicano activist in 1960s L.A. A onetime fugitive and sometime company man, Carlos Montes has kept on confronting the system the only way he knows how. Now the system is closing in

By Ben Ehrenreich

3/1/2012

The first raid came at five o’clock in the morning last May 17. Carlos Montes awoke to a thud. It was the sound, he soon discovered, of his front door splintering open. The sun had not yet risen, and Montes’s bedroom was dark, but in retrospect, he says, he’s glad he didn’t reach for a flashlight—or for a gun. Montes, a retired Xerox salesman, had kept a loaded shotgun behind the headboard and a 9mm pistol beneath a pile of towels on a chair beside the bed since the day he had walked in on an armed burglar a year and a half before. That time a cool head had kept him alive: He persuaded the thief to drive him to a 7-Eleven, where he withdrew as much cash as he could from the ATM and refused to take another step. This time, fortunately, he was half-asleep: He stumbled toward the hallway empty-handed.

Montes, 64, is a tall man, but his shoulders are rounded and slightly stooped, which along with his long, thin legs and the short fuzz of his gray hair, gives him something of the appearance of a bird. Maybe it’s that he always seems to be in motion, as if there’s a motor in him that keeps humming even when he’s sitting still. He often seems to be on the verge of cracking a joke, or as if he’s already laughing at the joke he could be telling. Once I showed up early for an interview and found him on the phone, reserving a space in a yoga class. “Gotta take my yoga, man,” he said, laughing at himself, “or else I’ll blow it!”

Standing in the bedroom of his Alhambra home, Montes saw lights dancing toward him. He hadn’t thought to grab his glasses, but when the lights got close enough, he understood that they were flashlights. Green helmets bobbed behind them. Inches beneath each beam he could make out the black barrel of an automatic rifle.

“Who is it?” Montes shouted.

Voices shouted back: “Police!”

Then they were behind him. They shoved him past the ruins of his front door and out onto the patio. Handcuffs clicked around his wrists. It was a cool, misty morning, but Montes could see that his narrow hillside street had been transformed, rendered unfamiliar and almost unreal by the two green armored vehicles parked in front of his house and by sheriff’s black-and-whites blocking the road to the left and right.

A sheriff’s deputy opened the door to one of the patrol cars and pushed Montes into the backseat. He sat there in the relative calm of the police car, the cuffs digging into his wrists, wondering, “What the hell are they going to arrest me for?”

An officer approached the car and told Montes he was under arrest, that he was a convicted felon and it was illegal for him to possess firearms.

“What?” said Montes. As far as he knew, he’d filed all the required papers for the weapons he owned. The police knew he had them. In 2005, after what Montes calls a “dispute” with a now ex-girlfriend, Alhambra police came to his house and took all his guns “for safekeeping.” (He was arrested on a domestic violence charge, but the case was dismissed.) A year later, after his ex moved out, Montes dropped by the station, and the police returned the guns. “I thought everything was cool,” Montes says.

It was at that point that the morning, already strange, took a stranger turn. Someone from the FBI was there, the deputy told him. An agent in a windbreaker appeared outside the squad car. He leaned in. “I want to talk to you about your political activities,” said the man from the FBI. Montes was not just any retired Xerox salesman. In the late 1960s, he had been one of the most visible and militant leaders of the Chicano movement in L.A. Long after the media spotlight had flickered off, he had continued to agitate and organize against police brutality, inequities in the public schools, and U.S. wars abroad.

Early the next morning Montes stood alone on the sidewalk outside the Twin Towers jail downtown. The sheriff’s department had released him as they had found him: in socks and pajamas, without his cell phone or wallet or change to make a call. Eventually he found a ride to Alhambra. His sister had come by his home and had a sheet of plywood nailed over his front door. But inside, he says, “the house was in shambles.”

Montes was something of a pack rat. He’d saved flyers, clippings, and photos from decades as an organizer of demonstrations and campaigns. “Everything was on the floor,” he says. In his bedroom the contents of his drawers and closet had been dumped out on the bed. Files, albums, and carousels of slides had been removed from his closets and stacked in piles on his kitchen counter and on the dining room and kitchen tables. Political documents were mixed with photo albums from his daughter’s birthdays and his son’s wedding. His guns were gone—the shotgun and the Beretta he’d kept beside the bed plus an old Russian bolt-action rifle, a World War II-era German automatic, and another rifle, a Marlin 30-30. (Montes’s antiwar stance was not grounded in across-the-board pacifism.) His cell phone and computer were gone, too.

Now, months later, Montes stands in his kitchen. His home is tidy but cluttered—the kitchen and dining room tables and every available space covered with neat stacks of papers. Images of Che Guevara, Malcolm X, and Emiliano Zapata figure prominently in the decor. “Once they got the guns,” Montes asks with eyebrows raised, “why did they go through the whole house?”

Forty-odd years earlier an unannounced visit from the FBI, even one fronted by a SWAT team with assault rifles drawn, would not have been surprising. Cold War paranoia had given J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI license to stalk and smear everyone from John Lennon to Martin Luther King Jr. Members of the Black Panther Party were falling by the dozens to police bullets. Through the haze of kitsch that surrounds that era it is difficult to make out the urgency of the times, the until recently almost inconceivable sensation that everything could change and that everyone, even high school kids from the east side of the L.A. River, had a crucial role to play. For a little while East L.A. felt like an important node in a struggle that was being mirrored around the globe—in Oakland, Paris, Mexico City, and Saigon.

But what happened here has for the most part been bleached out of the country’s collective memory of the ’60s. The Chicago Seven made the textbooks, but who remembers the East L.A. Thirteen? Or the Biltmore Six? Those trials have been over for decades, the whole period effectively entombed. And we’ve come a long way, right? The mayor of Los Angeles is a former union organizer and, though he doesn’t like to dwell on it, a onetime Chicano nationalist. The president of the United States is, famously, an ex-community organizer, and both he and his attorney general have much darker skin than Montes. So why is the FBI still interested in Carlos Montes?

In photos taken in the late 1960s, Montes managed to look at once cocky and intensely serious. The character based on him in the 2006 HBO film Walkout—about the 1968 protests at four East L.A. high schools—is portrayed as both joker and firebrand, a militant trickster in a khaki bush jacket. (“Ya estuvo con la blah blah blah,” he says in one scene, shushing his hesitant comrades. “We go out tomorrow!”) A year before the journalist Ruben Salazar was killed by a tear gas canister fired by an L.A. County sheriff’s deputy, he described Montes in the Los Angeles Times as a “lean, intense young man who often sports a Zapata mustache,…noted for his articulateness on the Chicano movement and his wit.”

The son of an immigrant assembly line worker and a nurse’s aide, Montes was born in El Paso and moved with his parents to Los Angeles when he was seven. “I bought into the whole thing about America, the greatest country,” he says. He was majoring in business at East L.A. College when he began to make connections between the Vietnam War, the routine racism of his teachers and school administrators, and the police harassment he and his classmates had faced throughout their teens. With the zeal of a convert, Montes fell in with a group of students who called themselves Young Citizens for Community Action. They opened a coffeehouse named La Piranya just off Whittier Boulevard. It quickly became a social and organizing hub for politically engaged Chicanos, who included future L.A. school board member Vickie Castro, writer and artist Harry Gamboa, and the film producer Moctesuma Esparza. Montes and his peers soon learned an important lesson, one that other young people were learning around the country: You can talk all you want, but the moment you start to organize, the authorities regard you as a threat. Police officers sat in cars outside La Piranya, photographing and hassling people who came and went. More than once the police raided the coffeehouse, claiming they were searching for drugs, frisking everyone inside.

Nothing creates radicals more effectively than repression. The YCCA—by now the Young Chicanos for Community Action—henceforth focused its organizing energies on battling police abuses. In January 1968, says Montes, “somebody went down to the Salvation Army and found a stack of brown berets.” They began wearing them with belted khaki jackets and established a hierarchy modeled on the quasi-military structure of the Black Panthers. Montes, who had just turned 20, was endowed with the grandiose title “Minister of Information.” Salazar referred to him as “the organization’s visionary.”

On March 6 of that year thousands of students walked out of class at Lincoln, Garfield, and Roosevelt high schools, demanding opportunities equal to those taken for granted by Anglo students on the other side of town. Birmingham, Alabama, had arrived in East L.A. The Brown Berets volunteered to form a protective barrier between the students and the police. They found police waiting in the streets and on the football fields. At Garfield, according to one account, snipers were posted on the roof. Montes managed to snap the chain on the gate at Roosevelt. The students who poured past him into the street were met with police batons and fists.

If the newspapers blamed the violence on the students, white L.A. was nonetheless forced to take notice. The Los Angeles Times expanded its vocabulary: “Chichano,” a reporter explained later that year, “is a Spanish expression meaning ‘one of us.’ ” By the end of March FBI headquarters ordered that the Brown Berets be investigated “to determine if activities of the group pose a threat to [sic] internal security of United States.” Within a few months a grand jury indicted 13 of the walkouts’ organizers, including Montes, charging them with a slew of petty misdemeanors rendered serious by the addition of felony charges alleging that the defendants had conspired to commit those same petty misdemeanors. Montes and Ralph Ramírez, the Berets’ “Minister of Discipline,” were in Washington at the time, attending the Martin Luther King-organized Poor People’s Conference. Riots had followed King’s assassination two months earlier, and the D.C. police chief, FBI records show, refused to arrest Montes and Ramírez for fear of inciting more unrest. Instead they were arrested upon their return to L.A.

The East L.A. Thirteen, as they were dubbed, were ultimately acquitted, but 1968 would be a busy year, busier than any until perhaps this last one. The whole world seemed in revolt. Students and workers were fighting police in the streets of Paris—and Chicago. Uprisings were crushed by Soviet tanks in Prague and by snipers’ bullets in Mexico City. Urban guerrilla movements emerged in Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, even Germany. To Montes, the synchronicity was life altering. So was the sense of solidarity, of being part of something larger: a world and a history that stretched far beyond the nest of freeways encoiling the Eastside. “It started becoming clear,” he says, sitting in an Alhambra Starbucks, hunched beneath a straw fedora. “This is not just about police harassment in East L.A. This is a global struggle.”

Brown Beret chapters sprang up around the country. The FBI responded, ordering all offices “having significant numbers of Mexican-Americans in their territories” to gather information on “militant” groups. They began infiltrating the Brown Berets and monitoring them in more than a dozen cities, from Riverside to Miami. Locally Montes’s visibility made him a constant target. Between February 1968 and July 1969, he was arrested seven times. He was convicted only once, of battery on a peace officer—for throwing a soda can at a deputy when police broke up a 1969 demonstration over the lack of a Chicano studies program at East L.A. College—and sentenced to probation.

Montes could not have known that conviction would return to haunt him. He had a more serious case to deal with. In the spring of that year, he and five others—the so-called Biltmore Six—were facing life in prison, accused of lighting fires at the Biltmore Hotel while Governor Ronald Reagan was speaking in the hotel’s ballroom. The police had a witness, a young LAPD officer named Fernando Sumaya who had infiltrated the Brown Berets four months earlier. Moctesuma Esparza was Montes’s codefendant once again. According to Esparza, their lawyer, Oscar Zeta Acosta (who would later gain fame as a novelist and as the model for Hunter S. Thompson’s Dr. Gonzo) learned that Sumaya’s testimony would directly implicate Montes. “Acosta let Carlos know that if he [Montes] was on the case, it would affect everybody. The next thing I knew,” says Esparza, “Carlos was gone.”

Montes likes to talk. His eyebrows leap and fall, punctuating his sentences. His head bobs, and his smile comes and goes. His stories tend to wander, detouring at one aside or another. That laugh of his often breaks out when he arrives at memories that must be painful, as if he’s narrating a slapstick version of someone else’s life. He laughs as he recounts deciding with his girlfriend at the time, Olivia Velasquez, to leave everything and everyone they knew: “Let’s get married, have a big-ass party, and take off.”

They held the wedding in a Boyle Heights backyard, celebrated into the night, and two days later caught a ride to Tijuana. Their plan was to fly from Mexico to Cuba, at the time the destination of choice for American radicals in exile. Except for one friend and Montes’s brother, they told nobody. In February 1970, La Causa, the Brown Berets’ newspaper, reported that Montes had disappeared, speculating that “he may have been kidnapped by the Central Intelligence Agency.” For a little while he was remembered as a martyr. “Carlos Montes will be looked at as a real Chicano Hero,” the article concluded. “In the new history of our people, he lives in the hearts of La Raza, and will never die.”

////

The second raid of this story would come almost precisely 34 years before the first, in May 1977. Montes and Velasquez had made it as far as Mérida, then headed back north to Ciudad Juárez. They had a son there and a year later moved to El Paso, where Velasquez gave birth to their daughter. Over the next five years Montes worked a series of blue-collar jobs under the name Manuel Gomez. He could not resist jumping back into the mix: He got involved in union activism and community organizing, even in electoral politics, though he did his best to dodge cameras and microphones. Montes knew the risks—“We were real paranoid,” he says—and is not particularly self-reflective about his motivations for taking them. He searches for words when I ask him why he took so many chances. “It was something I wanted to do,” he says, and apologizes, “I’m not verbalizing it well. We didn’t discuss whether we should, we discussed howand where.” Activism had become the only way he knew how to live, to situate himself on the planet in a posture that made sense.

In May 1977, Montes and Velasquez risked a trip home to California. Montes hadn’t seen his mother for seven years. His brother had paid him one clandestine visit, but for the most part Montes had been cut off from friends and relatives. The young family spent a weekend with Montes’s sister in Gardena, then dropped in on a family barbecue at Velasquez’s cousin’s house in Monterey Park. “Boom!” says Montes, laughing at the memory. “They raided the house. They had dogs and what looked like M16s.” As police stormed through the front door, Montes bolted for the back. “They rushed in and put a gun in my belly.” Someone had tipped the LAPD.

In Montes’s absence his Biltmore codefendants had been exonerated, but Acosta’s defense strategy had been to blame the fires on Sumaya—and on Montes. (Montes blames them on Sumaya. “I went to the bathroom, and Fernando [Sumaya] followed me,” he recalls. “He pulled a bunch of napkins from the napkin dispenser, threw them in the trash, and just lit them. I said, ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ and I got out of there.”)

After being escorted at gunpoint from his in-laws’ barbecue, Montes spent several weeks in jail trying to raise bail on the Biltmore arson charges that he had fled seven years earlier. “We formed a defense committee, a Free Carlos Montes committee. We did demos, fund-raisers, pickets,” he says. A few months before his trial began, an article appeared in the East L.A. College campus newspaper above a photo of a lanky, bushy-haired Montes wearing shades and pleated slacks. He had spoken on campus about police violence and racial inequities in the schools—“the same topics,” the reporter observed, that “he spoke against back in 1969 as a leader of the Brown Berets.”

But the movement Montes had helped found had begun to crumble while he was still in Mérida. Seven months after Montes went underground, more than 20,000 people marched down Whittier Boulevard to protest the war in Vietnam. The sheriff’s department’s attempts to break up the crowd left three dead—including Ruben Salazar and a 15-year-old Brown Beret—an untold number injured, and Whittier Boulevard in flames. In the aftermath police infiltration and harassment of Chicano activist groups increased exponentially. Rifts opened between the Brown Berets and the National Chicano Moratorium Committee (which had organized the march) as well as within the Berets.

“By 1972,” says Ernesto Chávez, who teaches history at the University of Texas, “it had all fallen apart.” The Berets’ central committee fired the group’s prime minister, David Sánchez, who promptly called a press conference and declared the Brown Berets disbanded. Even the FBI knew it was over: In a classified memorandum filed that February, agents reported that “most [Brown Beret] chapters are either inactive, defunct, or have deteriorated into social clubs.” Surveillance would continue until at least 1976.

Montes had emerged from underground like a revolutionary Rip van Winkle, eager to pick up where he’d left off. The Vietnam War was over, but, as Montes saw it, the old racist system was otherwise in place. His trial was another opportunity to bring attention to the cause, but when he reached out to old friends, he says, “people didn’t want to touch me. I was like a crisis from the past.” Few of his youthful colleagues seemed eager to help. Their youthful militancy had become a liability.

Ten years after the fact, Montes was found not guilty. There was also the matter of the battery-on-a-peace-officer conviction he had picked up in 1969, for which he was on probation when he skipped town, but the judge was convinced that “time has tempered Mr. Montes’s exuberance for radical action,” as he put it, and declined to punish him further for a crime already a decade old. (Thirty years later the judge’s words still spur Montes to giggles.) But even with his legal troubles resolved, Montes says, “No one would hire me.” Eventually an old comrade got him a job at Xerox, as a salesman, and for the next 20 years Montes would spend his weekdays in a suit and tie, hustling copiers in downtown office buildings. “I was kind of the oddball,” he says.

Moctesuma Esparza remembers running into Montes for the first time in decades—fortuitously in the lobby of the Biltmore, where they had last been together as fire alarms went off upstairs. Montes doesn’t recall the encounter, but it was likely less than comfortable. A few years earlier, he says, Esparza had asked Montes not to call him to testify in court. By the time they met, Montes was Xerox’s main salesman downtown. The Biltmore had given him a discount membership to the hotel’s health club. “He seemed to be doing very well,” Esparza says.

Perhaps it was because Montes was spared the disillusion of the bad days of the early ’70s, but he never changed course. In his off-hours he worked on Jesse Jackson’s presidential runs in 1984 and 1988, and on an antipolice brutality campaign following the killing of 19-year-old Arturo “Smokey” Jimenez by sheriff’s deputies in 1991. He tried repeatedly to reawaken the movement. Toward the end of the ’90s, Montes began writing for Fight Back!, a newspaper and Web site affiliated with a small sectarian leftist group called the Freedom Road Socialist Organization. The group—of which Montes says he is not a member—is a minuscule organization, a faction that in 1999 broke away from another group bearing the same name that was itself born of the combination of two other obscure groups with distant origins in the 1969 dissolution of Students for a Democratic Society. It is, in other words, an isolated and tattered remnant of the movement that won the FBI’s attentions a full half-century ago, when it was still referred to as the New Left.

Montes continued to show up at school board meetings to complain about creeping privatization and dirty bathrooms in Eastside schools. He turned out to march against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan even as the crowds grew smaller with each passing year. He was in front of the LAPD’s Rampart station in 2010, shouting into a bullhorn after police killed a Guatemalan day laborer on 6th Street, and there again in September to commemorate the anniversary of his death.

Montes fell in with the small quixotic tribe that had survived the sucking ’70s with revolutionary faith intact, the tireless picketers most of the city glimpses in passing through raised windows. He didn’t dwell much on the past. His daughter, Felicia, remembers accompanying her parents to constant rallies and community meetings—“That’s been what I’ve known for a long, long time,” she says—but she didn’t learn about her father’s role in the Chicano movement until she was an undergraduate at UC Berkeley, in an ethnic studies class.

I tried a few times to get Montes to talk about how lonely the years after his return must have been, how much disenchantment he must have had to overcome to keep struggling through the era of triumphant Reaganism. His answers rambled; the questions seemed to bounce off him. For him little had changed. None of the wrongs he fought in his youth ever went away—Americans were still killing and dying in faraway wars, young Latinos still contending with police harassment in the streets and with profound inequities in the classroom. The fight was what it always had been. I asked the historian Rodolfo Acuña, who teaches at Cal State Northridge and has known Montes since the 1960s, what he thought kept Montes going. Acuña answered obliquely: “He’s the same today as he was 40 years ago.

The third raid came eight months before the first, early on the morning of September 24, 2010. Mick Kelly, 54, was in the cafeteria at the University of Minnesota, where he is a cook, when his cell phone rang. It was his wife, Linden Gawboy. She had been awakened by men with assault rifles. The FBI was at their apartment. “They used a battering ram to take off the front door,” says Kelly, a slender, gray-mustached activist who also wrote frequently for Fight Back! and who had worked with Montes to organize the protests at the 2008 Republican National Convention in Minneapolis. “They smashed a fish tank,” Kelly says. “They took her outside in her nightgown.” He rushed home to find a dozen FBI agents emptying the couple’s filing cabinets, packing their papers into banker’s boxes.

Soon, Kelly says, “calls started coming in from friends.” The FBI had raided the Minneapolis office of the Anti-War Committee, the group that had taken the lead in organizing the RNC protests, as well as seven other homes belonging to peace activists in Minnesota, Michigan, and Illinois. Fourteen people had been subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury. All had either been involved in the RNC demonstrations or withFight Back! and Freedom Road.

Montes got a call from Minneapolis. “Be ready,” he was told. The search warrant for the Anti-War Committee office had listed the individuals in whom the FBI was interested: Agents were instructed to search for financial records connected to 22 named “members or affiliates of the FRSO.” Montes was number 14. By the end of 2010, everyone else on the list had been subpoenaed. (They have refused to cooperate with the grand jury.) “I figured, ‘OK, they’re gonna come sooner or later,’ ” says Montes.

It’s easy to blame law enforcement’s renewed scrutiny of political dissent on the September 11 attacks, but activists had begun to feel the chill two years earlier, after demonstrators in Seattle nearly scuttled the World Trade Organization meetings there. In the mass protests that followed in Washington, Philadelphia, and in L.A. during the 2000 Democratic National Convention, federal and local police discovered a new threat or, better put, rediscovered an old one: the homegrown leftist subversive. They responded with tactics that would have felt familiar to veterans of the 1960s—eavesdropping, infiltration, mass arrests, preemptive raids on activist headquarters.

After the World Trade Center towers fell, the FBI’s freedom to engage in domestic surveillance expanded almost without limit. COINTELPRO—J. Edgar Hoover’s counterintelligence program of informants, secret wiretaps, and covert burglaries—was a distant memory, one that few bothered to recall so long as the government’s new targets were foreigners, the 5,000 Middle Eastern noncitizens rounded up for questioning in the months after September 11. But the following year, Attorney General John Ashcroft revised the “Guidelines for Domestic FBI Operations,” redefining the bureau’s central mission as “preventing the commission of terrorist acts against the United States and its people.” The agency was no longer concerned exclusively with solving crimes but with the investigation of potential future criminals. This “proactive investigative authority” made it easier than ever to initiate investigations, demand information, obtain search warrants, and conduct surveillance—both through traditional methods and via electronic eavesdropping on a previously inconceivable scale.

Montes, who had retired from Xerox in 2001, saw the 2008 Republican National Convention as an opportunity to repudiate the political trends of the previous eight years, “to have a big, massive march so the whole world would see that the people condemn Bush.” That June he traveled to Minneapolis to attend a conference of activists who’d gathered to plan the demonstrations. He knew some of them already: Several members of the Twin Cities Anti-War Committee were also members of the FRSO.

Among the new faces was a short-haired woman with a Boston accent; she introduced herself as Karen Sullivan, a lesbian single mother who had joined the Anti-War Committee two months earlier. Montes doesn’t remember talking to her at any length until she initiated a conversation about Colombia at a conference in Chicago. He had long since been divorced from Velasquez and had twice visited the country with a Colombian ex-girlfriend (the one with whom he had fought in 2005). Sullivan told him her girlfriend was Colombian, too. “I said, ‘Oh, they’re beautiful women,’ and she said, ‘Yeah, they got big asses,’ ” Montes says. “I didn’t know if she was trying to bond with me or what.”

In the days leading up to the convention, local police—aided by the FBI and relying heavily on informants posing as activists—raided six homes used by protesters. Dozens were detained at gunpoint. Eight were arrested and charged under Minnesota’s version of the Patriot Act with “conspiracy to riot…in furtherance of terrorism.” (None were convicted. Local police and the FBI later paid out tens of thousands of dollars in settlements to activists.)

The protests were no less eventful. Thousands of demonstrators filled the streets. Montes spoke at the opening rally and, along with many others, was teargassed by police on the last day of the convention. He managed to evade arrest. Among the hundreds who did not was the woman who called herself Karen Sullivan. Montes saw the police take her away. For the next two years Sullivan would remain close with Montes’s friends in Minnesota. She made herself sufficiently useful that her colleagues trusted her with a key to the office and with the group’s bookkeeping. She joined Freedom Road and seemed particularly interested in fellow activists’ travels to Colombia and Palestine.

In the hours that followed the September FBI raids, as activists around the Midwest were frantically calling to check up on one another, Sullivan did not answer her phone. None of the people she had worked with over the previous two years has seen or spoken to her since. The activists deduced that the woman calling herself Karen Sullivan had been an undercover agent, a fact later confirmed by the U.S. Attorney’s office.

What wasn’t obvious was why Sullivan had been assigned to infiltrate the Anti-War Committee, why Obama’s justice department was so concerned with a handful of peace activists or with a group as obscure as the Freedom Road Socialist Organization. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan may not have been popular, but they also have not provoked anything that could be called a movement. The Occupy Wall Street protests have only focused glancingly on the wars. Despite the rhetoric of Tea Party politicians, socialist revolution in the contemporary United States is about as likely as an attack by the Spanish Armada.

But neither obscurity nor apparent harmlessness have stopped the FBI from testing its new powers. An internal review conducted by the Justice Department’s inspector general in 2010 criticized the bureau for subjecting four antiwar and environmental groups—the Thomas Merton Center, the Catholic Worker, Greenpeace, and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals—to lengthy domestic terrorism investigations, despite the fact that agents had “little or no basis for suspecting a violation of any criminal statute.” The raids in Minnesota and Illinois came four days after the release of the inspector general’s review.

The FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s office have refused to comment on the investigation—“We can neither confirm nor deny any investigative activity,” says FBI spokesperson Ari Dekofsky—which leaves activists guessing at the government’s motivations. “I think they really believe we’re terrorists,” says Montes with a pained smile. But whatever is behind the searches and subpoenas—whether it’s bureaucratic inertia or a concerted ideological attack—their message is as clear as it was in 1969: Dissent can be dangerous.

The search warrant issued for the raid on the Anti-War Committee office threw a small degree of light on the government’s intentions. Agents were looking for evidence that the subpoenaed activists had violated federal laws prohibiting “material support to designated foreign terrorist organizations”; specifically the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, or PFLP (a leftist faction of the Palestinian Liberation Organization), and the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, or FARC (one of the few surviving leftist guerrilla forces in Latin America).

In April Kelly and Gawboy made a discovery that clarified things slightly more. Mixed in with their own files in Minneapolis they found papers the FBI had apparently misplaced: the FBI SWAT team’s “Operation Order” for the raid on their home. The documents included a lengthy list of “FRSO Interview Questions,” ranging from the innocuous (“Have you ever heard of the Anti-War Committee?”) to the dramatic (“Have you ever taken steps to overthrow the United States government?”) to the quaintly McCarthyite (“Do you have a ‘red’ name?”) to the absurd (“What did you do with the proceeds from the Revolutionary Lemonade Stand?”).

Many of the questions focused on contact with the FARC and the PFLP. Several of those subpoenaed had traveled to Colombia and Palestine on the kind of odd vacations that earnest activists tend to take: They interviewed organizers and political prisoners, Kelly says, and when they got home, wrote and lectured about their findings. “What we’re talking about is extremely public activity,” says Kelly. “The point of making the trips is to be able to come back and talk about what’s happening.” Montes had visited Colombia twice with his ex-girlfriend. He met labor and human rights organizers there, he says, and a lot of writers—his girlfriend was a poet—but no one from the FARC. He gave presentations on his travels at Pasadena City College and at UCLA. “I had PowerPoint slides,” he says. “I denounced the assassination of labor leaders and indigenous leaders. I tried to get as much publicity as I could.” But the public nature of the trips may be what gets the activists in trouble: In 2001, the Patriot Act broadened the definition of “material support” to include “expert advice or assistance”; another law passed in 2004 expanded it still more to include “service,” a category the Supreme Court has since affirmed may include activities as basic as speech.

When the FBI finally arrived at Montes’s home in May, the agent’s first question would hew to a familiar script. He asked Montes if he would answer questions about the Freedom Road Socialist Organization. Montes remained silent. A sheriff’s department spokesman would later confirm that the raid on Montes’s house had been prompted by the FBI. Montes would be charged with four counts of perjury for neglecting to mention a 42-year-old conviction for assaulting a peace officer—the soda can thrown at police lines during the protest at East L.A. College—on the paperwork he filed when he purchased the weapons, along with one count of possession of a handgun and one count of possession of ammunition by an ex-felon. He is facing a possible prison sentence of 22 years. And like the 23 activists already subpoenaed, he is expecting to be indicted at any time for material support of a terrorist organization.

In the months since his arrest there have been fund-raisers in his honor at art galleries and in friends’ living rooms, campaigns to barrage Attorney General Eric Holder with e-mails and letters, and rallies as far away as Philadelphia, Dallas, and Gainesville, Florida. Montes has once again become something of an activist cause célèbre, though that is a humbler role today than it was the last time he was charged.

On September 29, the date of Montes’s preliminary hearing, the sidewalks outside the downtown courthouse are packed with camera crews. Montes paces the sidewalk in a blue pin-striped suit, grinning anxiously and chatting with his supporters, about 40 of whom have come out. A few wear red T-shirts silk-screened with the image of a young beret-clad Montes. They march in tight ellipses, waving picket signs and chanting “Hands Off Carlos Montes!” The reporters ignore them. They are here, it turns out, for the manslaughter trial of Dr. Conrad Murray, Michael Jackson’s physician.

A few LAPD officers stand outside the courthouse, watching idly. Two heavyset women in floral dresses pause beside the picketers, puzzled. Montes hands them flyers. “Oh,” says one woman to the other, “this is something else,” and they hurry on toward the courthouse door.

Someone gives Montes a microphone. He taps it. His voice booms out through a portable amplifier, thanking his fellow activists for showing up. A gaggle of journalists and photographers hustles past. Montes hurries to address them through the mic. “We’re here to support Carlos Montes,” he says, winking, “to keep him out of jail. Take a flyer, take a flyer.” None of them stops. The cars on Temple Street go honking by as they would on any other weekday morning. Reporters settle into folding chairs on the sidewalk across the street. Someone whispers that Janet Jackson has arrived. Holding the mic to his mouth, Montes looks briefly relaxed, almost at home. “I do want to say,” he begins again, “that the struggle continues.”

Ben Ehrenreich’s last piece for Los Angeles, “The End,” won the 2011 National Magazine Award for feature writing. His novel Ether (City Lights Books) came out in October.

]]>https://marxistleninist.wordpress.com/2012/03/22/carlos-montes-never-stop-fighting/feed/0comradezeromontes posterThe Quest for the Truth About Stalin: Review of Yuri Zukhov’s “Different Stalin”https://marxistleninist.wordpress.com/2012/01/22/the-quest-for-the-truth-about-stalin-review-of-yuri-zukhovs-different-stalin/
https://marxistleninist.wordpress.com/2012/01/22/the-quest-for-the-truth-about-stalin-review-of-yuri-zukhovs-different-stalin/#commentsMon, 23 Jan 2012 03:59:04 +0000http://marxistleninist.wordpress.com/?p=6717Continue reading →]]>The following book review by Yuri Yemelianov was suggested to The Marxist-Leninist by a comrade, and was originally titled “The Quest for the Truth About Stalin: About the book by Yuri Zhukov ‘Inoi Stalin’ (‘Different Stalin’)“:

The collapse of the socialist order in the Soviet Union and some other countries in Europe, the disintegration of the socialist bloc and the USSR were preceded by active Anti-Soviet propaganda. This propaganda was sponsored by the West and organised by the local Fifth Columns (in the USSR the most influential Fifth Columnists were such leaders of the CPSU as M. Gorbachev, A. Yakovlev, B. Yeltsin and others). The goal of the propaganda was to portray capitalism as a social system of freedom and respect for human rights and to depict socialism as a system of terror, human deprivation and misery. During the end of the 80’s and beginning of the 90’s many popular journals and magazines of the USSR and all TV channels spread lies about socialism and its history. The greatest distortions concerned Stalin’s period of the Soviet history. Using the false interpretations of the Soviet history made by N.S. Khrushchev at the XX CPSU Congress (1956) the enemies of Socialism bitterly attacked Stalin and his policies. Almost all the Soviet history was limited to the story of mass arrests and executions of 1937-1938. At the same time Stalin and his supporters were made responsible for gross violations of law, arrests and executions of many innocent people.

Now 15 years after the fall of socialism in Europe the vast majority of the peoples of the former socialist countries became aware of the evils of capitalism and as a result mass nostalgia for the lost advantages of socialism develops. It makes the present capitalist rulers of Russia and other former socialist countries renew their anti-socialist and anti-communist propaganda efforts. As the Anti-Soviet propaganda continues Stalin remains its central target and the object of fantastic lies. The authors of ‘documentary’ films shown over TV speak about 100 million people killed on Stalin’s orders. (The whole population of the USSR was about 200 million at the time of Stalin’s death and it is a mystery how a country so much weakened by arrests and executions could win over Nazi Germany and its allies.) The hackneyed phrases about ‘Stalin’s reprisals’ and ‘Stalin’s camps’ are in everyday use in the modern Russian political jargon.

However, the experiences of the last 15 years have made many people in Russia to be more distrustful of the official propaganda. Despite the strong pressure of the authorities, museums and monuments dedicated to Stalin appeared in one town after another all over Russia. More and more authors write articles and books in which they refute official lies about the Soviet past and give tribute to Stalin.

Not all of these authors are Marxists. But the experience of the collapse of their country made them search for true explanations of Russia’s history. Their acquaintance with the real facts of history and their professional integrity have made them refute the falsehoods of official propaganda and bring to life new facts about the Soviet society, its development and its leaders. One of such authors is Yuri Zhukov. His book ‘Different Stalin’ (‘Inoi Stalin’, Moscow, 2003) caused a real sensation among all those who are interested in Soviet history.

Yuri Zhukov

The title of the book is somewhat misleading. Zhukov does not try to probe deeply into Stalin’s personality and his book does not represent Stalin’s biography. The book covers only 5 years of Stalin’s political activity. As it is stated in its subtitle, the book is devoted to the political reforms of the USSR in the middle of the 30’s sponsored by Stalin.

Yet to a certain extent Yuri Zhukov was right in his choice of the title for his book. Though his book, as the author recognises, does not answer all the questions about the complicated and controversial period of the Soviet history, the facts used in it and the conclusions which follow them destroy the stereotypes which were widely spread all over the world since Khrushchev’s report at the XX Congress of the CPSU. Presenting a vast body of irrefutable facts Yuri Zhukov makes convincing conclusions which make Stalin look completely different from what he looked like in Khrushchev’s report and in the later fabrications of the Anti-Stalinist propaganda.

Khrushchev and those who repeated his false accusations tried to make people believe that the arrests and executions of many Party members in 1937-1938 were caused by the arbitrary methods of Stalin or his persecution mania. They claimed that no Communist party officials participated in subversive activity against the Soviet state and that there were no plots against the Soviet governments in the pre-war time whatsoever.

Though Yuri Zhukov does not make a detailed analysis of the subversive activities against the Soviet Government in the 30’s he shows in his book that the struggle of the Secretary of the USSR Central Executive Committee of the USSR A. Yenukidze against J. Stalin eventually led him to organise a plot in order to overthrow the Soviet government. Among the participants in this plot were the People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs (the chief of the USSR NKVD) N. Yagoda and those who were supposed to provide the security of the Kremlin.

While according to Khrushchev Stalin together with his Politburo colleagues (V. Molotov, K. Voroshilov, L. Kaganovich) were the arch-enemies of democratic procedures, Yuri Zhukov presents quite adifferent picture: Stalin brought forth a programme of democratisation of the Soviet life, with Molotov, Voroshilov and Kaganovich wholly supporting Stalin in his initiatives, while Yenukidze and many other Party officials were strongly opposed to Stalin’s democratic reforms.

Quite correctly pointing out the democratic principles of Stalin’s political reforms, Yuri Zhukov fails to show that they organically corresponded to the democratic nature of the Communist ideology and resulted from the natural development of the Soviet political life. While correctly reminding us of the attempts of the Soviet Government to organise a united international front against Hitler before the Second World War Yuri Zhukov tries to explain the political reforms inside the USSR by the foreign political goals of Stalin. According to Zhukov it appears that in order to consolidate the struggle against Hitler Stalin tried to build political life in the Soviet Union along the lines of bourgeois Western democracies. At the same time Zhukov considers that Yenukidze’s opposition to these reforms was caused by his fidelity to the ideals of communism and the world communist revolution and this caused his animosity both towards establishing closer political relations with the Western bourgeois democracies before the War and democratic reforms of Stalin.

Zhukov avoids dwelling on the democratic principles of communism and therefore distorts the reason why Yenukidze and others opposed Stalin’s reforms. Though A. Yenukidze and others supported Stalin in his struggle against opposition in the Party in the 20’s they eventually established alliance with the Trotskyites. This alliance developed due to the growing conflict between their personal interests and the goals of socialist development. Yenukidze’s opposition reflected curtain unhealthy tendencies which were spread among many Party and Soviet officials at that time.

It must be said that by the middle of the 30’s most of the Party and Soviet officials occupied their ruling posts since 1917-1918. At that time the Communist Party lacked educated members and many of the Party functionaries had an insufficient general and political education. Besides their first years of administrative jobs coincided with the Civil War. During these years they grew accustomed to resort freely in their work to military coercion rather than political arguments. This also explained to a great deal the excesses of collectivisation of 1929-1930. The much needed collectivisation of individual peasant farms turned into a veritable military campaign and many local first secretaries resorted to violence in order to make peasants join collective farms. In March 1930 Stalin censured these Party functionaries and wrote that they suffer ‘giddiness because of successes’ of the Soviet socialist construction.

Some of the Party functionaries were accustomed to their high administrative posts and many of them did their best to retain them at all costs. Many Party committees turned into hotbeds of intrigues and battlegrounds between politicians fighting for power. The competing groups accused each other of various ideological deviations. The purges which were periodically conducted in the Party in order to get rid of corrupt members were used by many of the first secretaries in order to expel from the Party those whom they consider to be their personal enemies.

Yuri Zhukov reminds that Stalin criticised the first secretaries of republican, regional and local organizations for creating ‘personal clans’, consisting of people who were devoted to them and flattered them. Stalin also said that whenever these party leaders get new appointments to other republics and provinces, they transfer ‘their personal clans’ with them.

At the same time Stalin said that the Party purges of 1935-1936 resulted in the expulsion of many Party members who were not guilty of any deviations from the Party line. Stalin pointed out that a number of those expelled from the Party by far exceeded the total quantity of those who supported Trotsky, Zinoviev and other leaders of opposition groups. He accused these Party leaders of the high-handed treatment of ordinary Party members and claimed that the purges only caused the anger of those expelled from the Party.

Yuri Zhukov also quotes the statement made by V. M. Molotov at the June (1937) plenary meeting of the Party Central Committee: ‘Lately comrade Stalin said several times that our old way of evaluating people is completely insufficient. A person may have a pre-revolutionary experience of Party membership. Then he has a good quality of having participated in the October revolution. He performed well in the Civil War. He fought against Trotskyites and the Rightists… But this is not sufficient. At the present moment we need… that the Party leaders are able to find appropriate understanding of people’s needs, to move ahead new people instead of those who have turned into bureaucrats”.

Stalin feared that the bureaucratisation of the Party may lead to its downfall. In 1937 he compared Soviet communists with Antaeus from the Greek mythology whose strength was invincible so long as he remained in contact with his mother Earth. Stalin said that until Communists ‘remain in contact with their mother — the people, who gave them birth, nourished and educated them, they have all the chances to remain invincible’. These words implied that when the Communists lose their contact with the people they may lose their strength and may be overwhelmed.

Though partly ignoring and partly distorting profound political and ideological issues behind the opposition of Party officials, Yuri Zhukov is quite right in stating that the struggle of Stalin and his opponents developed over the draft of the new Constitution of the USSR, which was worked at in 1935-1936, especially over the new order of elections.

From 1918 to 1936 deputies of local Soviets were elected by open voting at people’s assemblies. The local Soviets elected deputies to the provincial Soviets at open sessions. They in turn elected Republican Soviets, which elected the USSR Supreme Soviet. The representation of the townspeople was five times bigger than that of the villagers. Besides, all representatives of former exploiting classes as well as priests were banned from voting.

The new election system established direct and proportionate election with secret voting. The limitations put on former representatives of exploiting classes and priests were lifted. Using a Russian proverb (‘If you are afraid of wolves, you need not go to the forest’), Stalin mocked at attempts to preserve these limitations. At the All-Union Congress of the Soviets in November 1936 Stalin said: ‘First, not all former kulaks, white guardsmen and priests are alien to the Soviet power. Second, if people somewhere choose persons alien to the Soviet power, it would just mean that our propaganda work is good for nothing and we deserved such a shame. But if our propaganda develops in the true Bolshevik manner, then people would not let alien people to the supreme bodies’.

Besides, as Yuri Zhukov especially stresses, Stalin with the support of Molotov, Voroshilov, Kaganovich and others wanted to have elections on alternative basis. In the draft of the ballot for the first election to the USSR Supreme Soviet there were mentioned several candidates for one seat in the Soviet.

Yuri Zhukov correctly points out that changes in the election system to the Soviets were supplemented by Stalin’s proposals of vast changes in the Party leading personnel. Mentioning the speech of Stalin at the February-March (1937) plenary meeting of the Party Central Committee, Yuri Zhukov writes about the profound dissatisfaction of Stalin with the political and personal behaviour of many Party officials.

After the Moscow trials of August 1936 and January 1937, which revealed many cases of sabotage, after uncovering the Yenukidze plot in February 1937, Stalin and other Soviet leaders became convinced that many of the Party functionaries were so much engrossed in personal feuds that they did not care to pay attention to the activities of the Anti-Soviet plotters. Stalin came to the conclusion that it is necessary to re-educate the Party functionaries. In March 1937 at the plenary meeting of the Party Central Committee Stalin suggested that all Party secretaries from the highest to the lowest level (over 100 thousand functionaries) should attend courses of political education.

At the same time Stalin suggested that while the first secretaries study at such courses their jobs should be filled by other Party members. By the middle of 30’s due to the fast growth of the Soviet education the number of Party members who were University graduates immensely increased. After graduating from universities and other high education establishments these Party members acquired ample experience of work at the newly built Soviet plants. They actively participated in the socialist construction and were not involved in the intrigues of the Party provincial and Republican committees. Stalin, Molotov and others perceived these people as a fast growing reserve for the Party leadership.

Stalin’s proposals were meant to change drastically the composition of the Party leadership in the spirit of the new Soviet constitution. The old leadership would get better political and general training. At the same time many of the older officials would be replaced by persons with better education and sufficient experience of work at the modern enterprises.

Yuri Zhukov brings many facts to show that while Yenukidze, Yagoda and others resorted to secret plotting, many of the Republican and provincial Party leaders began silent but active sabotage of Stalin’s reforms. Citing articles written by the first Secretary of the Transcaucasus Party organisation L. P. Beria and by the first Secretary of the Moscow Party N.S. Khrushchev, Yuri Zhukov shows that the leading party functionaries either ignored the new Constitution and the elections according to the new system, or expressed exaggerated fears that class enemies may use the elections according to the principles of the new Constitution in order to become deputies to the USSR Supreme Soviet.

Yuri Zhukov asserts that the opposition of the first secretaries of republics and provinces to the new Constitution was caused by their fears of losing their seats in the Soviets during the elections. Many peasants (and not only kulaks) remembered the excesses of collectivisation and they could vote against those who in 1929-1930 tried to overfulfil plans of collectivisation at all costs disregarding attitudes of peasants. Yuri Zhukov correctly points out that if such Party secretaries failed to be elected to the Soviets, their positions as Party leaders might be questioned as well.

According to Yuri Zhukov the major effort to undermine the democratic reforms urged by Stalin, Molotov and others was undertaken by the alternate member of Politburo and the first Secretary of the Western Siberian province Party organization R.I. Eikhe. At the end of June 1937 he presented a memorandum to the Politburo with proposals which ran counter to Stalin’s political reforms. Though the text of the memorandum is not found, there is ample evidence of its existence in allusions and decisions taken on the basis of the memorandum.

According to Yuri Zhukov, R.I. Eikhe asserted that there are in Western Siberia many exiled former kulaks who planned to organise a counter-revolutionary uprising. Eikhe asked the Party Central Committee for a sanction to form a so called ‘troika’ composed of the Attorney of the province, the provincial chief of the NKVD and Eikhe himself. The ‘troika’ should have extraordinary powers in order to investigate the counter-revolutionary activities and take judicial decisions concerning the plotters.

Yuri Zhukov compares the Eikhe memorandum with ‘a small stone that causes an awful avalanche’. It was soon followed by a decision of Politburo of July 2 which supported the contention that many former kulaks and ordinary criminals, who returned to their original places of residence after their prison terms expired, launched counterrevolutionary activities. The decision claimed that these people ‘are major instigators of Anti-Soviet activities and sabotage acts in collective and Soviet farms, as well as at transport and several branches of industry’. The decision demanded that the most active instigators of Anti-Soviet activities and sabotage should be immediately arrested and shot, while less active enemies should be exiled. The decision demanded that in five days’ time the provincial party leaders should send to the Party Central Committee lists of ‘troikas’, number of persons to be arrested and shot, number of persons to be arrested and exiled.

Why did such a radical change in the position of Stalin and other members of Politburo take place? Yuri Zhukov contends that this occurred due to a strong pressure put by a big number of the first secretaries upon Stalin. Having mentioned a number of visits paid to Stalin and Molotov by the leading provincial Party functionaries who shared the position taken by Eikhe, Zhukov suggests that they presented a veritable ultimatum to Stalin, Molotov and others.

In order to understand why Stalin, Molotov and other Politburo members changed their policy, one should also take into account some facts which are mentioned in Zhukov’s book, but briefly. First of all one should bear in mind the exposure of Marshal Tukhachevsky’s plot which took place in May. The plotters had connections with the German generals and planned a coup d’etat. While the majority of the participants of the plot were military persons, there were several civil members of the Party Central Committee among them. The People’s Commissar for Inner Affairs (chief of NKVD after the dismissal of G.Yagoda) N.I. Yezhov made a report at the June plenary meeting of the Party Central Committee asking their members for permission to arrest 11 full members and 14 alternate members of the Central Committee involved in the Tukhachevsky plot.

For some reason Yuri Zhukov does not take into account the facts narrated in a book written by Vladimir Pyatnitsky ‘The Plot against Stalin’, which is specifically dedicated to the June (1937) plenary meeting of the Party Central Committee. Though the author of this book attacks Stalin, he recognises that during this plenary meeting there were a number of speeches made against prolonging the extraordinary powers of the NKVD and Yezhov. An especially vehement protest was made by I.А. Pyatnitsky (the father of the author) who was the chief of the Political-administrative department of the Party Central Committee and for a long time was the secretary of the Central Executive Committee of Comintern.

Stalin tried to come to terms with Pyatnitsky during the plenary meeting. After Pyatnitsky’s speech an interval was announced. Molotov, Voroshilov and Kaganovich talked to I.А. Pyatnitsky and said that Stalin believed in his personal honesty and values, his talent as a good organiser and administrator. They asked Pyatnitsky to retract his statement. But Pyatnitsky was adamant. Afterwards 15 other Central Committee members supported Pyatnitsky and demanded the cessation of the extraordinary powers of the NKVD and Yezhov.

At this time one of the Central Committee members Filatov told Stalin that the opposition of Pyatnitsky and others to NKVD was a result of the decision reached at a secret meeting at Pyatnitsky’s apartment.Filatov was the only participant of this meeting who informed Stalin about it. Just a month ago in May Stalin got informed about the Tukhachevsky plot exposed by NKVD. Now he learned about a secret meeting attended by dozens of Central Committee members who tried to stop further investigations by NKVD.

So when Eikhe and other Central Committee members came to Stalin and Molotov with requests not to curb NKVD activities but increase them though redirecting them against former kulaks Stalin and his closest colleagues had a reason to suppose that these suggestions came from quite an opposite quarter. In reality Stalin faced opposition to his policy on two fronts. While Pyatnitsky and others demanded the end to arrests of high functionaries involved in anti-government plots and blamed NKVD of arbitrariness, Eikhe and others praised the NKVD but just wanted to direct it to other goals.

One may suppose that at that time N.I. Yezhov was not quite sure of his position. As a chief of the Political-administrative department of the Party Central Committee Pyatnitsky controlled the NKVD.Yezhov knew that Stalin trusted Pyatnitsky. Yezhov might have feared that he might lose his position as the chief of NKVD if Pyatnitsky and his supporters would prevail. Therefore Yezhov joined with Eikheand others. Zhukov is quite right in supposing that ‘Yezhov easily came to terms with Eikhe, many first secretaries and agreed with the necessity as soon as possible to do away with the those who were certain to vote against them’.

Thus Stalin and his staunch supporters found themselves opposed not only by the influential groups constituting the majority of the Central Committee members but also by the NKVD armed with extraordinary powers. This may explain why Stalin and others made a sudden turn in their policies.

Meanwhile, as Zhukov states, the first secretaries presented their requests for the exile and executions of underground counter-revolutionaries which they promised to discover in their provinces and republics. Zhukov points out that ‘the most blood-thirsty turned out to be two persons — R.I. Eikhe, who declared his intention to shoot 10,800 inhabitants of Western Siberia… and N.S. Khrushchev, who suspiciously quickly managed to find and count in Moscow province 41,305 former kulaks and criminals and then insist on their expulsion and execution’. It is noteworthy that in his report at the XX Party Congress Khrushchev said not a word either about the Eikhe memorandum, or about the requests for exiles and executions filed by Eikhe and himself. Instead Khrushchev praised Eikhe and depicted him as an innocent victim of Stalin’s terror.

Showing that Stalin and his closest colleagues temporarily lost control over the situation, Zhukov points out that many of the active supporters of Stalin in his democratisation reforms (Y.A. Yakovlev, B.M. Tal, A.I. Stetzky) lost their jobs and then were arrested. It is clear that Stalin was unable to defend some of his supporters. There is other evidence that Yezhov did not want to limit himself to executions of smaller figures among Stalin supporters. Later, when Yezhov was arrested papers were found in his personal safe which he collected in order to prepare ‘a case’ against Stalin.

At the same time Yezhov, Eikhe and others could not risk overthrowing Stalin and his supporters. The name of Stalin was the very embodiment of socialism. The popularity of Molotov, Voroshilov andKaganovich was also great. Many cities, factories, collective farms were named after them. Yezhov and others covered their opposition to Stalin by constant flattery and statements of fidelity to him. Yezhoveven proposed to name Moscow after Stalin and to call it Stalindar. The proposal was resolutely rejected by Stalin.

Paradoxically the attempt of Eikhe and others to divert NKVD activities from investigations of plots among the Party functionaries did not stop their arrests. Getting permission to uncover Anti-Soviet counterrevolutionary plots, some of the first secretaries hastened to demand arrests of their rivals for high posts. Thus the first secretary of the Central Committee of the Uzbekistan Communist Party A.I.Ikramov asked the Politburo on June 24 1937 to replace the Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of Uzbekistan Faizulla Hodzhaev ‘for his counterrevolutionary connections’. Later Hodzhaevwas arrested.

However, the supporters of Hodzhaev managed to incriminate Ikramov. As Zhukov points out Ikramov himself was expelled from the Party in September 1937 and then arrested. In March 1938 bothHodzhaev and Ikramov were executed on the accusations of high treason and espionage during the Moscow trial.

Many rivalries were settled in 1937 in the similar manner, as many of the Party functionaries tried to do away with those who might successfully compete with them for the vacancies in the Party and Soviet hierarchy. Soon the campaign of false accusations spread all over the country. Many people slandered their colleagues and they were arrested by the NKVD. This period of mass violations of law was later called the ‘Yezhovshina’. It is obvious that the illegal practices unleashed initially by a number of the Party functionaries ran counter to the principles advocated by Stalin and his policy of democratisation. This allows Yuri Zhukov to make a conclusion that ‘the attempt of Stalin to reform the political system of the Soviet Union resulted in a complete fiasco’.

This categorical statement by Yuri Zhukov might be contradicted. First, despite stubborn opposition by the influential body of the Party functionaries the Stalin Constitution was adopted and the first election to the USSR Supreme Soviet was conducted in a new way (direct, equal, secret). Second, Stalin with the support of many Communists gradually began to restore legality, which was violated by the provincial secretaries and NKVD. In January 1938 the plenary meeting of the Party Central Committee condemned the ‘formalistic and bureaucratic approach to the appeals of people expelled from the All-Union Communist Party’ and demanded to take resolute measures in order to stop such practice. The decision of the Central Committee paid attention to a number of arbitrary expulsions of Party members in the second half of 1937. The decision proclaimed a return to the principles advocated by Stalin in March 1937 at the plenary meeting of the Party Central Committee.

Though the decision put all the blame for the violations of legal norms on the local Party functionaries, the position of Yezhov began to weaken. In August 1938 the Politburo began investigating the work of NKVD. In November 1938 Yezhov lost the post of chief of NKVD. In April 1939 he was arrested and accused of gross violations of legal norms. Eikhe and other secretaries who were active in launching a campaign of exiles and executions were also arrested.

At the same time many thousands people arrested during the Yezhovshina were released. Among them was a number of Soviet generals, including K.K. Rokossovsky, who played an important part in the Great Patriotic War.

Despite the heavy losses inflicted by the Yezhovshina, the Soviet Union was not fatally weakened by it. First, among those arrested and executed in 1937-1938 were real spies and enemies of socialism. Unlike the countries of Western Europe the USSR proved to be free from the ‘Fifth Column’ which let Hitler win victories. German generals complained during the first months of the war that they lacked true information about the Red Army and the Soviet defence industry as they did not have sufficient numbers of their agents inside the USSR. With the exception of general Vlasov who surrendered to the Germans in 1942 and later collaborated with them, Hitler failed to find support among the high ranking Soviet ruling body.

Second, many of career-minded politicians who cared only for their power lost their jobs, freedom and lives during the inner strife of 1937-1938. Their jobs were eventually taken by others. Yuri Zhukovrecognises that one of the results of the events of 1937-1938 was the emergence at the top Soviet leadership of persons who were better educated and had better experience in modern economy. The jobs of marshals and officers involved in the Tukhachevsky plot were taken by younger officers who had better military education. The new Party functionaries who replaced those arrested in 1937-1938 were sincerely devoted to the cause of communism and were better educated politically unlike many of older functionaries. The new leadership of the Party, Soviet economy and the Red Army proved its worth during the Great Patriotic War.

And the last, but not the least consequence of the events of 30’s was the consolidation of the Soviet people around Stalin and his policies. It should be noted that the mass reprisals of the 30’s touched mostly the social strata which constituted only a minority of the Soviet people. At the same time the adoption of the Stalin Constitution which proclaimed the principles of socialist democracy and embodied the achievements of socialist construction, made most of the Soviet people realise the obvious advantages of the new socialist order. The devotion of the Soviet people to this order was demonstrated by its heroic struggle during the Great Patriotic War.

Yet Yuri Zhukov is correct in pointing out that in 1937-1938 Stalin failed to implement some of the essential features of his political reforms. Zhukov specifically mentions the fact that due to the stubborn opposition of many Party functionaries in 1937 Stalin had to forsake his plan of conducting elections with alternative candidates. The only relic of Stalin’s idea was an inscription at the top of every ballot at each election held in the Soviet Union until it ceased to exist in 1991 which said: ‘Leave in the ballot the name of ONE candidate, for whom you vote, striking out all the rest’. Though in practice the inscription did not make sense, as during these elections there was just ONE candidate, the inscription reminded that in principle the voters should have a choice out of a number of candidates.

Zhukov fails to mention also an obvious fact that Stalin’s plan of political education of Party functionaries which he unveiled in March 1937 also failed to be materialised. Perhaps the difficulties of the pre-war period, the war and later the cold war did not allow Stalin to organise the education of all acting Party functionaries. As a result many important posts were still occupied by functionaries who lacked appropriate political and general education. Among them were such persons like N.S. Khrushchev and L.P. Beria. Initially they silently sabotaged Stalin’s reforms. Then they were active in the Yezhovshina. But they were quick-witted enough to see the change in the political climate and they became active in fighting Yezhov and his supporters. Though Stalin was aware of their low level of general and political education and their other faults he valued their energies. Both Khrushchev and Beria continued to occupy important jobs.

While Stalin constantly tried to move forward persons who were whole-heartedly devoted to the cause of communism, had a good education and experience in practical work, it seems that he understood the shortcomings of the existing political leadership of the Soviet Union. During the XIX Congress of the CPSU Stalin made another effort to change the composition of the high ranks of the Party. He suggested the enlargement of the body of the newly created Presidium of the CPSU Central Committee by recruiting to it a number of outstanding leaders of the Party provinces, organisers of economic production and theoreticians. In the first months of 1953 Stalin prepared a document in which he suggested that he would resign from the post of the Chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers and this job would be taken by the former first secretary of Byelorussian Communist party and former chief of the General headquarters of the USSR partisan movement during the War P.K. Ponomarenko.

It is known that L.P. Beria and N.S. Khrushchev were bitter enemies of Ponomarenko since the War years. Also the appointment of Ponomarenko might signify that other changes should soon to follow. The sudden illness and then death of Stalin later caused many suspicions. It was claimed that Stalin was poisoned by his colleagues. At least it is clear that Beria, Malenkov and Khrushchev who visited Stalin after he was found lying unconscious on the floor in his residence, did not even call a physician to examine him. Three years after Stalin’s death Khrushchev began his Anti-Stalin campaign.

The faults of the Soviet way of selecting persons for ruling positions became evident during the 11 years when N.S. Khrushchev occupied the job of the First Secretary of the Party Central Committee. These were the years which became notorious for a number of gross mistakes in ideology, economic and political spheres as well as in the foreign policy of the USSR. Though Khrushchev was dismissed by the unanimous vote of the Party Central Committee in October 1964, there was nothing done to modify the political system of the USSR and CPSU. The subsequent events showed that the political system of the CPSU and the USSR did not prevent coming to power such traitors of communism and their own country like Gorbachev, Yakovlev, Yeltsin. It is quite probable that if Stalin and his supporters had managed to implement the political reforms the USSR might have had a better system of selecting their political leaders and thus prevent Khrushchev, Gorbachev and others from coming to power.

It is also obvious that though Yuri Zhukov does not share the communist ideology, he, like a true Russian patriot, is sorry that Stalin’s political reforms were not completed. Though Yuri Zhukov recognises that his quest for true explanations of the events of 30’s in the USSR is incomplete as many documents related to the period are still kept secret or were destroyed on the orders by Khrushchev, his book demonstrates the falsehood of fabrications made by Khrushchev and his followers about the events of 1937-1938. With all its obvious faults and shortcomings Zhukov’s book made a new and important inroad into the study of the Soviet history.

]]>https://marxistleninist.wordpress.com/2012/01/22/the-quest-for-the-truth-about-stalin-review-of-yuri-zukhovs-different-stalin/feed/7comradezerostalin_xviyuri-zhukovKorea Resilient! Socialism in the DPRKhttps://marxistleninist.wordpress.com/2012/01/19/korea-resilient-socialism-in-the-dprk/
https://marxistleninist.wordpress.com/2012/01/19/korea-resilient-socialism-in-the-dprk/#commentsThu, 19 Jan 2012 21:25:39 +0000http://marxistleninist.wordpress.com/?p=6715Continue reading →]]>The following is from Return to the Source:

On December 22 of last year, “Fight Back! News, which often reflects the views of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO), published an outstanding overview of the DPRK and US imperialism in the Korean Peninsula entitled “Korea Stands Strong: Kim Jong-Il in Context.” The piece did a tremendous job outlining the advances made by Korean socialism and the problems arising from continued Western occupation of the southern half of the Korean nation.

In response to Fight Back!’s thorough analysis, along with two other pieces by the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) and the Workers World Party (WWP), David Whitehouse of the International Socialist Organization (ISO) released a hit-piece on Kim Jong-Il and dusted off the typical Cliffite-Trotskyite arguments against actually existing socialism. Published January 12, ‘Socialism in One Dynasty’ rehashes the same anti-communist lines of the ISO that have come to characterize Trotskyism.

Kim Jong-Il’s death prompted a discussion among the left about Democratic Korea again, and with such a high volume of anti-DPRK propaganda generated by the West, it’s important for Marxist-Leninists to accurately represent the successes and challenges facing the Korean revolution. The simple fact that the DPRK survived the wave of counter-revolution that swept through most socialist countries demonstrates the strength and resilience of the Korean masses, and Democratic Korea’s perseverance in the face of overwhelming Western aggression demands close study by Marxist-Leninists in the 21st century.

DPRK troops fighting for reunification

Korea Divided

As the Fight Back! News article points out, “Korea is a single nation that was forcibly divided by the United States immediately after World War II.” (1) The DPRK and the Republic of Korea exist as two separate countries, but the Korean people meet all of the characteristic features of a nation; “a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture.” (2) Understanding that Korea is not two separate nations is essential to placing the actions of the DPRK in their appropriate context.

Fearing the widespread popularity of the Korean revolution in both the north and the south, the US continued to militarily occupy the Republic of Korea after World War II. Koreans were left out of the decision to divide their country and despite promises of fair nationwide elections aimed at reunification, the US intervened in the South Korean elections on behalf of the Western-educated, right-wing nationalist, Syngman Rhee.

Many bourgeois scholars and critics of the DPRK argue that the Korean People’s Army (KPA), centered in the north, initiated the Korean War by crossing the 38th parallel, the act that is often cited as the start to the Korean War. While the KPA did send troops into South Korea on June 25, 1950, calling this an act of aggression by one sovereign state towards another implicitly legitimizes the imperialist division of Korea at the Potsdam Conference in 1945. Richard Stokes, the British Minister of Works, put it this way in a 1950 report on the origins of the Korean war:

“In the American Civil War the Americans would never have tolerated for a single moment the setting up of an imaginary line between the forces of North and South, and there can be no doubt as to what would have been their re-action if the British had intervened in force on behalf of the South. This parallel is a close one because in America the conflict was not merely between two groups of Americans, but was between two conflicting economic systems as is the case in Korea.” (3)

Much like the American Civil War, any so-called aggression by the North was actually an attempt to re-unite a nation partitioned by a foreign imperialist power. Any critics of the actions of Democratic Korea in initiating the conflict would have to also condemn US President Abraham Lincoln and the Union Army for sending supplies to reinforce Fort Sumter at the onset of the American civil war, which was the de facto spark that started the conflict.

Of course, Marxist-Leninists support the re-unification efforts of the North in both the American civil war as well as the Korean war because they were historically progressive and revolutionary. Korea was occupied by a foreign imperialist government at the time of the KPA’s incursion into the south, just as Japanese colonizers had occupied the nation for the previous 35 years. As such, the KPA’s ‘invasion’ of southern Korea was a campaign in the larger, protracted struggle for national liberation that began as an anti-colonial struggle against imperial Japan.

Foreign occupation of Korea continues today, and Marxist-Leninists must evaluate the actions of the DPRK within the framework of an ongoing national liberation struggle. The 28,000 US troops permanently stationed in the Republic of Korea attest to the continued imperialist domination of the southern half of the Korean nation.

Kim Jong-Il reviewing production plans

The Disgraceful Slander of Korean Socialism

Although the ISO’s article was full of attacks on Marxist-Leninists and their position on the DPRK, it presented no actual rebuttal of the piece on Fight Back! News, itself a very telling omission. The closest that Whitehouse could get to refuting that article was the following passage:

FRSO, for example, dwells on a system of social services that includes universal health coverage and education, as well as free housing. This record is remarkable for a country of North Korea’s limited resources. It is not remarkable, however, for a country where the state controls everything. The state has to provide health care, education and housing, because there are no institutions outside the state–unless you count Kim’s Workers Party, which is bound up with the state and permeates all aspects of North Korean life. (4)

Notice that Whitehouse does not challenge the factual assertions in the Fight Back! News article pertaining to Korean socialism. Whitehouse is backed into the uncomfortable position of admitting that the record of the DPRK’s social services is ‘remarkable’, a stunning admission for an organization whose statement of principles claims that actually existing socialist countries, like Democratic Korea, “have nothing to do with socialism.” (5) Instead, the ISO attempts to downplay these ‘remarkable’ accomplishments by noting that the state is the only organized entity in Korean society capable of providing these services.

Of course this begs a number of questions: What other organized entity would the ISO rather have provide these essential social services in Democratic Korea? Return to the Source, along with the Freedom Road Socialist Organization and other Marxist-Leninists around the world, support the decision of socialist governments to use heavily regulated market socialism to develop productive forces and provide goods and services to the people. However, the ISO explicitly rejects the strategy undertaken by China and Cuba in the last year as further evidence of the country’s ‘state capitalism’. (6) What then, in concrete terms, would the ISO like to see out of the Democratic Korean state if they already agree that their services are ‘remarkable’, complain that no private entities exist to provide these services otherwise, but simultaneously reject the application of heavily regulated markets to socialist countries?

There is an answer to these questions, but the truth doesn’t favor the ISO. Trotskyite factions – materialists should never refer to these tiny organizations as parties in the Marxist-Leninist sense – have never led the masses in revolution precisely because they understand socialism and revolution in utopian terms. The ISO doesn’t believe that Democratic Korea is a socialist country because the WPK doesn’t measure up to their abstract, and often dogmatic, catechism of Marx that uses his call for communists to ‘win the battle for democracy’. (4) They repeat ad nauseum that socialism is a society in which workers control the means of production, but their idealism clouds them from recognizing that a revolutionary society like the DPRK, while imperfect, has already achieved that end.

When examining Democratic Korea, we must critically appraise their successes but only in the context of the insufferable imperialist aggression they face from the United States and the Republic of Korea. The DPRK continues to face difficulties in socialist construction, but most of these problems stem from unfavorable external conditions and imperialist aggression. Since the cession of hostilities in 1953, the US “maintained fairly comprehensive economic sanctions against North Korea.” (7) Access to essential goods and food staples is greatly restricted by the US and Japan, who cut off the shipment of rice to the DPRK in 2003. (7)

While Whitehouse’s article pays lip-service to the sanctions imposed on Democratic Korea, along with the continued legacy of destruction brought on by the Korean war, it dismisses these adverse conditions as a way “to excuse the behavior of the regime domestically, waving aside the charge that it is an oppressive dictatorship.” (4) Indeed, the fact that any mention of the Korean war is limited to four paragraphs in the middle of a 46-paragraph article demonstrates that the ISO is more interested in slandering the DPRK and pushing their bogus state capitalism line than applying a rigorous, dialectical materialist analysis of Korean socialism.

As the Fight Back! News article aptly pointed out, you cannot understand the DPRK without a Marxist-Leninist understanding of the national question, which yields the undeniable conclusion that Korea is a single nation occupied by an imperialist force after the cession of hostilities in 1953. The often-misconstrued ‘secrecy’ of the Korean government makes perfect sense in light of the overhanging threat of destruction they face across the demilitarized border zone.

Socialist realist art depicting Democratic Korea

Korean Socialism in Action

Marxist-Leninists must study the short-comings of Democratic Korea, but they must also enthusiastically praise the outstanding gains accomplished by the Korean revolution. As Bruce Cumings, Professor of Korean History at the University of Chicago, points out in his 2003 book,North Korea: Another Country, ”Modern Korea emerged from one of the most class-divided and stratified societies on the face of the earth, almost castelike in its hereditary hierarchy.” (3) Cumings notes that slavery encompassed anywhere from 60-90 percent of society until its abolition in 1894, in which most slaves were converted into feudal peasants ruled by Korean, and eventually Japanese, overlords. (3)

The expulsion of Japanese colonialism in World War II and the establishment of socialism in the north brought these enormous class disparities and abuses by the exploiting classes to an end. Cumings cites US security reports on the situation in revolutionary Korea to prove that “For those defined as poor and middle peasants, not only did their lives improve but they became the favored class.” (3) The WPK’s commitment to bottom-up socialist revolution was reflected in their class composition at the time of its founding, in which “laborers constituted 20 percent of the membership, poor peasants 50 percent, and samuwon [white-collar workers] 14 percent.” (3)

The Korean revolution gave opportunities to workers and landless poor peasants that were unimaginable under the past oppressive conditions. Cumings again writes, “At any time before 1945, it was virtually inconceivable for uneducated poor peasants to become country-level officials or officers in the army. But in North Korea such careers became normal.” (3) He also notes that inter-class marriages became normal, common, and widespread with the establishment of Democratic Korea, and educational access opened up for all sectors of society.

On the vital question of land reform, the WPK undertook a gradual but steady process of converting private land ownership into cooperative organizations. Beginning with the process of post-war reconstruction in 1953, only 1.2% of peasant households were organized as cooperatives, which encompassed a mere .6% of total acreage. (13) By August of 1958, 100% of peasant households were converted into cooperatives, encompassing 100% of total acreage. (13) Ellen Brun, an economist whose 1976 Socialist Korea study remains the most comprehensive to date, writes that “In spite of lack of modern means of production, the cooperatives – with efficient assistance by the state – very early showed their superiority to individual farming, eventually convincing formerly reluctant farmers into participating in the movement.” (13)

Often a point of criticism from left-communists, Trotskyites, and anticommunists, collectivization in the DPRK did not result in any famine or mass starvation. In fact, “at no time during cooperativization did the agricultural output decrease; on the contrary, the process was accompanied by a steady increase in production.” (13) Citing statistics of food production, Brun shows a sharp increase from about 2.9 million tons in 1956 to 3.8 million tons in 1960. (13) Stemming from Democratic Korea’s push for self-sufficiency, the WPK put the nation on a path to increase its food production steadily and feed the entire country.

Local people’s committees, in which any Korean worker could participate, elected leadership to guide agricultural production and collaborated with national authorities to coordinate nation-wide efficiency. (13) These people’s committees were the primary means by which “the Party remains in contact with the masses on the various collective farms, thus enabling it to gauge public opinion on issues affecting the policies of the country people’s committee.” (13) In 1966, the WPK introduced the “group management system,” which “organized groups of ten to twenty-five farmers into production units, each of which was then put permanently in charge of a certain area of land, a certain task, or a certain instrument of production.” (13) This represents another instrument of people’s democracy implemented in Korean socialist production.

No serious antagonism between the countryside and industrial centers developed in the process of socialist construction in Democratic Korea. Brun notes that “tens of thousands of demobiilized men and many junior and senior graduates as well as middle school pupils went to the countryside in the busy seasons and rendered assistance amounting to millions of days of work,” all voluntarily and without coercion by the state. (13)

Most importantly, Korean socialist construction reorganized industrial production by and in the interests of the formerly dispossessed Korean proletariat. Drawing on the mass line – the Marxist-Leninist organizing method that “is both the cause and effect of the politicization and involvement of the masses in the process of economic development and socialist construction” – the WPK implemented the Daean work system in December 1961. (13) In contrast to the past system, in which managers were appointed to oversee a workplace unilaterally by a single party member, “The Part factory committee assumes the highest authority at the level of the enterprise” in the Daean work system. (13) Brun further describes this system, and I will quote her at length:

“Ways of solving questions affecting production and workers’ activities, as well as methods of carrying out decisions, are arrived at through collective discussions within the factory committee, whose members are elected by the factory’s Party members. To be effective this committee has to be relatively small, its precise numbers depending on the size of the enterprise. At the Daean Electrical Plant, with a labor force of 5,000, the Party factory committee is made up of 35 members who meet once or twice a month, while the 9 members of the executive board keep in continuous contact. Sixty percent of its members are production workers, with the remainder representing a cross-section of all factory activities, including functionaries, managers, deputy-managers, engineers, technicians, women’s league representatives, youth league members, trade union members, and office employees. Its composition thus gives it access to all socioeconomic aspects of the enterprise and the lives of its worker.

This committee has become what is called the ‘steering wheel’ of the industrial unit, conducting ideological education and mobilizing the workers to implement collective decisions and to fulfill the production target. Through its connection to the Party it has a clear picture of overall policies and aims as well as the exact function of individual enterprise in the national context. In other words, this setup ensures that politics are given priority.” (13)

Far from the simplistic and farcical characterizations of Whitehouse and the ISO of the DPRK as “a country where one man holds dictatorial power and the vast majority of people live in poverty,” this model of socialist organization represents the highest commitment to workers democracy. (4) Workers have input and supremacy in production and interact dialectically with the state to plan and carry out collectivist production on behalf of the whole Korean people.

The workplace in Democratic Korea isn’t simply a venue for production, but as emphasized with the Daean organizing method, a center for education and enrichment. After 1950, “worker schools” organized at specific workplaces began to emerge, in which laborers would attend middle and high school education programs while working in industry in order to prepare them to continue their education in college. (13)

Korean socialism achieved an impressive standard of living for the Korean people prior to the collapse of its largest trading partner, the USSR, in 1991. As independent scholar Stephen Gowans points out in his 2006 article, “Understanding North Korea,” Democratic Korea enjoyed a comparable standard of living to their neighbors in the south well into the 1980s. (14) Living spartan lifestyles, the Korean people were nearly self-sufficient in terms of light industry and consumer goods by 1967, with goods like textiles, underwear, socks, shoes, and alcoholic beverages becoming increasingly available for every citizen. (13)

Heavy industry, however, remained “the backbone of the economy,” in the words of Brun. She notes that “although assistance from socialist bloc countries may have been substantial at the beginning of the rebhabilitation period, a few years later – after the record year of 1954 – this foreign aid began to decrease and North Korea gradually had to become self-supporting.” (13) Because of trade politics brought on by the Sino-Soviet split, the DPRK gradually lost some of the aid it received from the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, they managed to develop their heavy industry substantially, progressing 51.7% in industrial output from 1953-1955. (13)

Korean socialism suffered tremendous setbacks in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union and most of the socialist bloc. Resilient as ever, the nation persevered through these difficult years despite facing famine, heinous weather conditions, and blocked access to international trade by Western imperialist powers. (14) Democratic Korea stabilized and its commitment to genuine workers democracy continues to remain as steadfast as ever.

Kim Jong-Il, who looked much scarier than he actually was

Kim Jong-Il and the Prime Importance of a Nuclear Korea

Most telling of all is the ISO’s choice to not attack the argument that Democratic Korea acquiring nuclear weapons was an essential and positive development for the long-term security of Korean socialist construction. Given that nuclear capabilities were such an important aspect of the Fight Back! News article, Whitehouse’s choice to not engage this line of argument was a deliberate and conscious choice brought on by the inconvenient holes in the ISO’s counter-revolutionary political line. From the Fight Back! News article:

“The importance of Democratic Korea acquiring nuclear weapons cannot be overstated. In 2005, the U.S. presented an ultimatum to both Libya and the DPRK, demanding that both surrender their nuclear weapons programs and cooperate with Western imperialism in the ‘war on terror.’ Libyan head of state Muammar Gaddafi played ball. Kim Jong-Il gave the U.S. a figurative middle finger. As we near the end of 2011, having witnessed NATO’s brutal invasion of Libya and the toppling of Gaddafi’s government, it’s painfully clear who made the right choice.” (1)

Even bourgeois journalists like Tad Daley of the Christian Science Monitor concur with this assessment by Fight Back! News. In a piece from October 13, 2011 entitled “Nuclear lesson from Libya: Don’t be like Qaddafi. Be like Kim,” Daley writes:

If Libya had possessed the capability, oh, to obliterate a major American military base in Italy, or to vaporize an entire American “carrier battle group” off the southern coast of France, it almost certainly would have dissuaded Washington (not to mention Rome and Paris) from military action. If the Libyan regime wanted to ensure its own survival, then, just like North Korea, it should have developed a nuclear deterrent – small, survivable, and just lethal enough to inflict unacceptable damage on any aggressor. (8)

The fact that both of these leaders, Qaddafi of the Libyan Jamahiriya and Democratic Korea’s Kim, died in the same year in such radically different ways provides an interest point of contrast. Qaddafi was ousted after a set of imperialist-backed rebels launched a racist campaign to topple a revolutionary government in North Africa, which succeeded precisely because of NATO’s assistance. He died beaten, broken, sodomized, tortured, and executed in a muddy sewage pipe without trial.

Kim, on the other hand, died peaceably from a heart attack on a train en route to a factory inspection and a public meeting with Korean workers. While his death rocked the Korean people with grief, from Pyongyang to Beijing and beyond, the Korean revolution continues and shows no signs of wavering. China’s proximity to Korea is a factor in Democratic Korea’s continued security, but nothing keeps the American military from an all-out war to topple the WPK more than the threat of a nuclear bomb destroying one of their many military bases across the Republic of Korea. The fact that the imperialists cannot turn a false-flag operation like the so-called ‘Cheonan incident’ last year into a Gulf-of-Tonkin-style cause for a second Korean war is the nuclear deterrence that Kim Jong-Il’s leadership made possible. (9)

The ISO cannot engage this argument. It’s objectively true and provides possibly the best evidence for the revolutionary contributions of Kim Jong-Il to Korean socialism. To harshly criticize the WPK for aggressively, and secretly, pursuing a nuclear weapons program is to invite even harsher criticism of their ludicrous line on the Libyan conflict, which made the call for ousting Qaddafi front-and-center as opposed to condemning NATO’s invasion.

Fed by their Cliffite-Trotskyite ideology, the ISO has a long history of supporting the toppling of revolutionary governments, which came to a head in 1991 when their sect called the fall of the Soviet Union an event that “should have every genuine socialist rejoicing.” (10) Most recently, the ISO spent the initial stages of the Libyan conflict ignoring the blatantly pro-Western direction of the counter-revolution that started in Benghazi and downplaying the systematic and racist terrorism practiced by the ‘rebels’. (11) After NATO invaded, this Cliffite-Trotskyite sect continued to push a ‘Qaddafi Must Go’ line as its central focus, which in practice proves again and again to function as a de facto left-cover for imperialism.

Embarrassingly, the group never retreated from this line and incorrectly summed up the Libyan counter-revolution as progressive movement co-oped by NATO. Even after Qaddafi’s death and the inescapable evidence that these rebels were Western-backed counter-revolutionaries from the beginning, ISO leader Alan Maass still performed logical gymnastics to try and twist their bogus line into something resembling anti-imperialism, claiming that, despite being the victim of an imperialist invasion to topple his government, Qaddafi was actually a puppet of the West. (12)

Anyone reading Whitehouse’s piece about Kim Jong-Il should sum this up as an admission of defeat by the ISO for both their Libya line as well as their line towards Democratic Korea. Marxist-Leninists can advance a criticism of Qaddafi’s government for giving up its nuclear weapons program in the face of immense pressure from the West, but that means that the choice by Kim Jong-Il to continue pursuing nuclear weapons was unquestionably the correct path. Daley puts it this way:

But instead, Qaddafi was seduced by the siren song of the West. Give up your weapons of mass destruction, they said, and we will welcome you into the international community. Libya did, in late 2003.

And in retrospect, said the North Korean official, it was now clear that this had been, by the West, no less than “an invasion tactic to disarm the country.” Because as soon as the now-defanged Qaddafi took actions that displeased Libya’s Western overlords, the mighty military hammer of the developed world came thundering down upon him. (8)

The ISO’s failure to advance any kind of rebuttal – or any mention whatsoever of the nuclear question – once again demonstrates the ISO’s non-materialist understanding of socialism, both in theory and practice.

Mass outpouring of grief after the news of Kim Jong-Il’s death

Mass Grief in the DPRK

Central to the ISO’s attack on the Marxist-Leninist position on Democratic Korea is their critique of the often-touted ‘cult of personality’ surrounding Kim Jong-Il. Whitehouse puts it this way:

It’s true that Korean rituals–and Koreans in everyday life, for that matter–are emotionally expressive, more so than Chinese or Japanese ones. But it’s another thing to say that it was merely “traditional” to gather people by the hundreds of thousands in the freezing cold to mourn the death of state leaders in the shadow of monuments and photos that depict them ten or 100 times life size.

That does seem “orchestrated.” And what about the soldiers marching in formation with their weapons in massive columns–didn’t they have to practice? (4)

Of course, the exclusion of any serious rebuttal to the Fight Back! News article tells Marxist-Leninists a lot about the contrived nature of the ISO’s political line. Addressing allegations that the mass display of grief was ‘staged’ by the Korean People’s Army (KPA), Fight Back!’s article begins with an anecdote in a Korean restaurant in Beijing, far away from the eyes of the KPA. Here I will quote the article at length to illustrate the contrast:

The morning of Dec. 19 started like a normal Monday for the Korean staff at the Hae Dang Hwa restaurant in Beijing. The greeting staff welcomed hungry customers at the front door, the chefs began prepping their fine selection of kimchi and other Korean dishes and the waitresses and waiters began taking down orders for their guests. All of that changed when a China Daily reporter mentioned in a conversation with a waitress that Kim Jong-Il, the head of state for the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), had died that morning of a heart attack. In minutes, the entire Korean staff – from the waiters to the chefs in the kitchen – broke down in tears and, after apologizing to the customers, closed the restaurant early for the day so they could grieve the national tragedy together.

Several thousand miles away in Pyongyang, mass sorrow like that experienced in this Beijing restaurant took the swept the capital as men, women and children – from the most esteemed party official to the steel worker – took to the streets to mourn Kim’s death. (1)

This is tremendously inconvenient for the image the ISO wishes to paint. On one hand, it doesn’t make sense that any army could compel an entire nation with near unanimity to weep and publicly display grief in a public way. However, the restaurant anecdote taking place in Beijing pokes enormous holes in Whitehouse’s claim, since these restaurant employees – overcome with grief to the point of closing the kitchen early – would face no repercussions for not displaying grief.

Whitehouse attacks the FRSO using a pathetic reconfiguration of the arguments made in the Fight Back! News article that one can only classify as the most dishonest strawman. Rather than actually engaging Fight Back!’s argument, he re-writes their argument to make the aforementioned anecdote look like evidence “to certify the democratic credentials of a regime that looks to everybody else like an autocracy.” (4)

While the Fight Back! News article, as well as this author, agree that Korean socialism is supremely democratic, the last paragraph expresses the central argument of this piece:

“Why do Koreans mourn the death of Kim Jong-Il? It’s because of his courageous defiance of U.S. domination, his commitment to the reunification and the real accomplishments of socialism. In the face of those who wage war for exploitation and oppression, Kim’s decisions represented the aspirations of Korean workers, peasants, women and children – the united Korean nation – for freedom. Although Kim Jong Il has passed away, the Korean people will continue to march forward raising the banner of national reunification, self-determination and revolution.” (1)

Far from simply ‘certifying the democratic credentials’ of the DPRK, the mass outpouring of grief by the Korean people demonstrate the widespread understanding of the gains of Korean socialism and the tireless struggle for national reunification.

Democratic Korea’s rehabilitative penal system

North Korean Gulags?

Central to the ISO’s anti-communism is a heavy reliance on bourgeois sources that have proven themselves unable to withstand the most basic materialist scrutiny. For instance, Whitehouse attacks the Fight Back! News article by saying that the title, “”Korea stands strong,” they are referring to the strength of the state. It is the same state that keeps 200,000 political prisoners, according to Amnesty International. It is the same state that shot dead three North Korean citizens who were trying to cross the border into China in late December.” (4)

A more principled examination of the Korean prison system in the north – referred to as a ‘gulag’ by the bourgeoisie and the ISO alike – ironically comes from bourgeois historian Bruce Cumings. In his 2004 book, North Korea: Another Country, he notes that most claims about the Korean penal system are grossly exaggerated. For instance, he notes that “Common criminals who commit minor felonies and small fry [sic] with an incorrect grasp on their place in the family state who commit low-level political offenses go off to labor camps or mines for hard work and varying lengths of incarceration,” the goal of which is to “reeducate them.” (3) This reflects a materialist understanding of the roots of crime, arising in large part from a person’s material conditions and incorrect ideas, which can change through altering a person’s conditions. It’s important to note that the vast majority of criminals in the Korean penal system fall into this category and thus the aim is to rehabilitate and reeducate, as opposed to the punitive aims of the American penal system.

Cumings notes the contrast between Democratic Korea’s criminal justice system and that of the United States, especially in terms of a prisoner’s contact with and support from their family. He writes:

“The Aquariums of Pyongyang is an interesting and believable story, precisely because it does not, on the whole, make for the ghastly tale of totalitarian repression that its original publishers in France meant it to be; instead, it suggests that a decade’s incarceration with one’s immediate family was survivable and not necessarily an obstacle to entering the elite status of residence in Pyongyang and entrance to college. Meanwhile we have a long-standing, never-ending gulag full of black men in our prisons, incarcerating upward of 25 percent of all black youths.” (3)

The fact that time in the Korean penal system does not result in social castigation like it does in capitalist countries reflects a stark point of contrast with capitalist penal systems. Using one’s family as a support network, the state encourages political reeducation and opens opportunities for rehabilitated prisoners to re-enter Korean society as full citizens.

—

In and of itself, Whitehouse’s hit-piece on Korean socialism isn’t worth the bandwidth it takes up because it doesn’t make any serious arguments against the Fight Back! News piece to which it was supposed to respond. However, it remains important for Marxist-Leninists to confront the ISO’s unique and disturbing blend of left-anticommunism when it arises and defend the gains of the Korean people.

Despite its challenges and shortcomings, Democratic Korea is one of the last remaining countries where workers were able to control society collectively as a class. As one of the socialist countries to survive the fall of the USSR, Marxist-Leninists must study and learn from the resilience of the Korean people.

On Sept. 17, 2011, a group of protesters gathered in Zuccotti Park in New York City. Their intention: to expose Wall Street greed and corporate domination over the lives of working and middle class people, the 99%. Almost immediately, police responded to the protesters with repression and pepper spray. This caused thousands of New Yorkers to flood to Zuccotti Park. Occupy Wall Street was on. Protesters camped in the park and did not leave for 59 days. Support for the protest built quickly and spread across the country and around the world. Within weeks, almost a thousand cities had Occupy protests. U.S. cities big and small had Occupations, including Chicago, Fort Worth, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Oakland, Salt Lake City, Seattle, Tampa and Winston-Salem.

Many of the protesters camping full time in the occupations are white students from middle or working class backgrounds, while others are unemployed and/or homeless. However, hundreds of thousands join the occupiers for protests during the day and on weekends, especially when unions are mobilized. These union mobilizations changed the composition of Occupy dramatically, as seen in New York or Chicago, where thousands of African-American, Puerto Ricans, Chicanos and other oppressed nationalities took to the streets and public parks. Solidarity and appreciation grows in the process of protesting together.

One slogan emerged from the protests that captured the sentiment about the cause of the economic crisis: “We are the 99%.” Occupiers include a wide array of people being punished by the big economic downturn – students, professionals, small business people, workers, the unemployed and the homeless. The slogan makes it clear that people need to stand up to a government and an economic system that is run for the benefit of a handful of very wealthy people.

In city after city, the protests of the Occupy Movement have been met with police violence and repression. In New York City, police pepper sprayed and beat protesters and bystanders in hundreds of incidents. Videos show police arresting people for nothing more than filming the police response to the protests.

In Oakland, when riot police moved in to shut down the Occupy encampment, they fired tear gas into crowds. A tear gas canister fired directly at protester Scott Olsen struck him in the head, knocking him unconscious. His skull was fractured and he was hospitalized for several weeks. Olsen, an Iraq War veteran, had trouble speaking for weeks following the incident. Another occupier, ex-Marine and Iraq War veteran Kayven Sabeghi, suffered a ruptured spleen from to a police beating.

In Fort Worth, protesters were ticketed for everything from meter violations to sleeping in public. In one notorious case caught on video, a police officer claimed an American flag brushed him, so he grabbed the American flag and struck the protester from behind with the flagpole and then punched him in the face. The Occupy protester was arrested.

In Chicago, more than 300 protesters were arrested in a single week for trying to set up an Occupy camp. In Minneapolis, police seized every tent the occupiers tried to set up and, while they were at it, took food, blankets, and more. In Winston-Salem, police tried to shut down a People’s Forum and stole the group’s banner. Later, they shut down a city-approved meeting that was taking place on the city hall lawn and even arrested one occupier for talking back to them.

Police repression, more than the winter weather, has put an end to permanent Occupy encampments in most cities for now. A handful, like Madison, Wisconsin and Albany, New York, hang on. In Albany, the police chief refuses to use city resources to clear protesters from parks. It is clear now that three rounds of mass arrests and park clearances were organized at the national level – with Homeland Security and the FBI coordinating with local officials.

Police shut down the Occupy Oakland camp on Oct. 25, 2011. Occupy Oakland rebuilt the camp the next day. Then, on Nov. 2, Occupy Oakland called for a general strike, including a popular shutdown of one of the busiest ports in the U.S. Renamed a “mass day of action”, it was supported by many local unions and labor councils, most importantly the International Longshore and Warehouse Union. The mass action also shut down much of downtown Oakland and some schools, with tens of thousands of people taking to the streets. There is no way to know how many thousands more stayed home from work in solidarity. The new Occupy Oakland camp stayed open until the police shut it down again on Nov. 14.

On Dec. 12, the Occupy movement took the port shutdown idea to ports all over the West Coast. Ports in Oakland; Seattle and Longview, Washington; Portland, Oregon and Houston, Texas were partly or completely shut down for some part of the day. The mass shutdown of ports was controversial for some union leaders who opposed it, while saying they support the Occupy Movement, but many union members supported and participated. The cost to the ports, the cities, and the companies involved was many millions of dollars.

Occupy the Campus is a developing trend, with the college student protesters being beaten with batons at University of California (UC) Berkeley causing over 3000 students, faculty and workers to protest on campus. Then at UC Davis, there was the infamous police officer pepper-spraying of students who were sitting down and linking arms in an act of civil disobedience. This outraged students, parents and others across the country, in a similar way to the beatings of Civil Rights protesters 50 years ago. Over 5000 rallied at UC Davis to demand that the police be charged with a crime and that Chancellor Linda Katehi resign from her post. With students returning to campus, meetings and plans for what to do next with Occupy are brewing.

Despite the efforts of the 1%, the Occupy Movement is far from dead. The tactics of the occupiers have shown great creativity and variety. In Minneapolis and other cities, occupiers are challenging home foreclosures. In Grand Rapids, occupiers held a mock trial of former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for war crimes she committed in connection with the Iraq War. Rice was speaking at a fund raising dinner a few hundred yards away. When Occupy Oakland shut down the ports, occupiers in Salt Lake City, Utah marched in support. Occupiers in Durham, North Carolina, Dallas, Texas and Champaign, Illinois march on big banks like Chase and Wells Fargo to hold the banks responsible for the economic crisis.

There is no way to know what will happen next with the Occupy Movement. It is clear, however, that the Occupy Movement represents an awakening of class-consciousness and protest in the United States. The economy is heading for more problems in 2012 and more people are suffering. We cannot predict what form the struggle will take, but we confidently predict that 2012 will be an even better year for struggle than 2011.

The morning of Dec. 19 started like a normal Monday for the Korean staff at the Hae Dang Hwa restaurant in Beijing. The greeting staff welcomed hungry customers at the front door, the chefs began prepping their fine selection of kimchi and other Korean dishes and the waitresses and waiters began taking down orders for their guests. All of that changed when a China Daily reporter mentioned in a conversation with a waitress that Kim Jong-Il, the head of state for the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), had died that morning of a heart attack. In minutes, the entire Korean staff – from the waiters to the chefs in the kitchen – broke down in tears and, after apologizing to the customers, closed the restaurant early for the day so they could grieve the national tragedy together.

Several thousand miles away in Pyongyang, mass sorrow like that experienced in this Beijing restaurant took the swept the capital as men, women and children – from the most esteemed party official to the steel worker – took to the streets to mourn Kim’s death.

Most people in the United States have a hard time understanding the sorrow of the Korean people and the Western media spent the better part of the past few days ridiculing this mass display of grief. After all, it’s inconceivable to imagine the death of any U.S. leader – President or otherwise – eliciting unanimous mourning from the American people. Nevertheless, even the harshest critics could not deny the sincerity of the tears shed by the Korean people, both in the DPRK and abroad, on the morning of Dec. 19.

The Western media tells us that DPRK government is ruthlessly oppressive, and yet the Korean people’s reaction seriously contradicts this image. What is it about Democratic Korea and its leaders that cause its people, even those far away from the eyes of government authorities, to mourn like this?

Misinformation presented by the Western media cause many to see Democratic Korea as a highly repressive, brutal regime with no accountability to the Korean people. A closer look past the slanderous – and often fabricated – claims reveal a strong nation, resilient in the face of more than a century of imperialist aggression that, against all odds, continues to mobilize the Korean masses in the process of building socialism.

Korea is a single nation that was forcibly divided by the United States immediately after World War II. To this day, the DPRK remains committed to reunification. After 35 years of horrifying treatment by Japanese colonizers, the Korean people’s brief hope for a single, unified Korea was dashed when the Truman administration launched a military campaign to violently suppress the Korean revolution. Aided by the Soviet Union and socialist China, the Korean People’s Army (KPA), led by Kim Il-Sung, pushed the U.S led invasion back to the 38th parallel, now the southern border of the DPRK.

Over the course of the Korean War, the U.S. dropped more bombs on Korea than it did in the entirety of the World War II Pacific theater, killing more than a million Koreans and destroying most of the north’s cities. Equally horrific was the execution of hundreds of thousands of suspected communist sympathizers by Syngman Rhee’s U.S.-backed fascist government, which took power in southern Korea.

Despite the destruction caused by the Korean War, the DPRK undertook an ambitious reconstruction effort that allowed them to enjoy a higher GDP and better standard of living than the U.S.-supported regime in the south, which consistently suffered from high unemployment and low wages brought on by Western sweatshops. It wasn’t until the 1980s and the eventual collapse of the DPRK’s largest trading partner, the Soviet Union, that the Republic of Korea would overtake the north in economic productivity.

Even the U.S. government cannot deny the accomplishments of Korean socialism. Written behind closed doors in 1990, a declassified CIA report admits that the DPRK administers outstanding social services for children, guarantees totally free housing to citizens, provides a highly successful country-wide public preventative medical program, oversees a police force with an extremely low level of corruption and has achieved high life expectancy and low infant mortality rates.

The same CIA report points out that there are more college-educated women than men in the DPRK, and admits that the Workers Party of Korea legitimately committed to ‘radical change’ in Korean gender relations. The facts support their conclusion: Prostitution is outlawed, women are permitted to serve in the military, state child-care programs allow women to have independent careers outside of the house and a significant number of high level political positions are occupied by women, including representation in the Supreme People’s Assembly.

The DPRK’s remarkable public health care system – which provides unconditional universal coverage for citizens – continues to perform tremendously well, even in the midst of crippling U.S. sanctions. Just last year in a report to the United Nations on the North Korean health care system, Dr. Margaret Chan, the Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO), called it “something which most other developing countries would envy.” She pointed out that the “DPRK has no lack of doctors and nurses,” and praised the system for its “very elaborate health infrastructure, starting from the central to the provincial to the district level.”

Imperialist aggression against this defiant revolutionary government continues to this day, manifesting itself in more than 28,000 U.S. troops permanently stationed in South Korea and the overhanging threat of U.S. Navy freighters carrying nuclear missiles in the Korean Peninsula.

Seeing the emboldened aggression of U.S. after the fall of the Soviet Union, the DPRK sought to insure their protection from another Korean War by acquiring nuclear weapons. Facing an onslaught of trade sanctions and the threat of invasion, Democratic Korea preserved and announced their first successful nuclear test in 2006, an achievement spearheaded by Kim Jong-Il.

The importance of Democratic Korea acquiring nuclear weapons cannot be overstated. In 2005, the U.S. presented an ultimatum to both Libya and the DPRK, demanding that both surrender their nuclear weapons programs and cooperate with Western imperialism in the ‘war on terror.’ Libyan head of state Muammar Gaddafi played ball. Kim Jong-Il gave the U.S. a figurative middle finger. As we near the end of 2011, having witnessed NATO’s brutal invasion of Libya and the toppling of Gaddafi’s government, it’s painfully clear who made the right choice.

Why do Koreans mourn the death of Kim Jong-Il? It’s because of his courageous defiance of U.S. domination, his commitment to the reunification and the real accomplishments of socialism. In the face of those who wage war for exploitation and oppression, Kim’s decisions represented the aspirations of Korean workers, peasants, women and children – the united Korean nation – for freedom. Although Kim Jong Il has passed away, the Korean people will continue to march forward raising the banner of national reunification, self-determination and revolution.

The United States and its Western allies, along with reactionary pro-U.S. Arab regimes in the Middle East, are doing everything in their power to bring down the government of Syria. They have imposed sanctions that harm the Syrian people. They interfere in Syria’s internal affairs, with the aim of spreading disorder and chaos. Behind these attacks there is the steady drumbeat threatening foreign military intervention.

Like the U.S./NATO war on Libya, the reasons for imperialism’s ongoing assault on Syria’s government have nothing do with human rights. In fact, the U.S. government has shown time and time again that it couldn’t care less about human rights, or for that matter human life. One million plus lives were lost in Iraq. The Pentagon uses drones on the people of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen. Thousand have died. American tax dollars sponsor death squads in Colombia and finance the occupation of Palestine. From New York to Los Angles, police have been brought in to repress the Occupy movement. The U.S. government has no right to lecture anyone, anywhere, anytime about human rights.

What Washington does care about is controlling the resources of the Middle East. Syria stands in the way of the Western empire builders, so they have determined that the government of Syria must go. It’s really that simple.

Syria plays a positive role in the Middle East. Its people and government are supportive of the struggle to free Palestine and assist the patriotic forces in Lebanon. Syria opposes Zionism and imperialism. The point here is not that the government of Syria is perfect or without fault. The point is this: It would be a sad setback for the collective efforts of the Arab peoples to achieve national liberation if Syria was pushed into a civil war, or delivered into the hands of those who have sold their soul’s to Washington and the West.

It’s important for the anti-war movement in this country to learn from what happened in Libya – where the United States and NATO rained down death and destruction on the Libyan people.

We should oppose the sanctions on Syria. Sanctions pave the way to war. We should support an independent Syria and demand the U.S. stop its interference in Syria’s internal affairs. And we should raise our voices against any attempt use military force, be it by the U.S., the European powers or their proxies, against Syria. Those who want peace with justice cannot do otherwise.

Hands off Syria!

]]>https://marxistleninist.wordpress.com/2011/12/15/u-s-hands-off-syria-end-the-sanctions-now/feed/2comradezerospokesman-for-us-imperialism-threatens-military-action-against-syriaRevolutionary Black Metal: “Prepare for battle, comrades!”https://marxistleninist.wordpress.com/2011/12/15/revolutionary-black-metal-prepare-for-battle-comrades/
https://marxistleninist.wordpress.com/2011/12/15/revolutionary-black-metal-prepare-for-battle-comrades/#commentsThu, 15 Dec 2011 21:21:29 +0000http://marxistleninist.wordpress.com/?p=6704Continue reading →]]>The following is from the U.S. Black Metal band, Typhonic Age. This track, “Storm the Heavens” is being posted here since the lyrical content and imagery reflects the revolutionary outrage of so many of the current upheavals. This track and others are available for free download from the band’s bandcamp page.

Lyrics:

All that you have taken
You will return tenfold
All that we have lost
We will reclaim

This is our unyielding
Declaration of war
Against this society
Of hypocracy and lies

This is our warcry
Hear it chill the bones
Of the crusaders
On their shattered battlements (trembling)

Prepare for battle comrades
Their final hour is at hand
Under banners of blood
We storm the heavens

Only a few cowards
Stand in our way
With torches in hand
We unleash the wrath of a new dawn

PRESIDENT Mugabe yesterday said the indigenisation and economic empowerment programme would take centre stage at the Zanu-PF 12th Annual National People’s Conference, which starts in Bulawayo today.

Speaking during his photographic exhibition at the Zimbabwe International Trade Fair (ZITF) last night, the Head of State and Government and Commander-In-Chief of the Zimbabwe Defence Forces said the time has come for ordinary Zimbabweans to have a say in the national economy.

He said the liberation struggle was fought in order to repossess the land from the white minority and empower black people economically.

“Our sovereignty would not exist unless we own the land. We must be masters of our destiny and manage the natural resources below and above the earth’s surface. We must train ourselves hand skills and pride ourselves in being able to manage our affairs.

“Let us not be content with being employees. Let us fight to be employers and owners of companies. The big companies should cede shares to black people,” said President Mugabe.

“We will not drive away those companies that brought investment into the country but we will not allow them to be our masters. This is what we will be discussing in our conference meetings, which start tomorrow.

“Each one of us must feel proud to be a Zimbabwean, feel proud to have a role in ensuring that our past does not destroy the revolution.”

The Government has already started the indigenisation programmes in the country through the Community Share Ownership Scheme Trust (CSOS/T), a countrywide initiative meant to spearhead development and empower rural communities by giving them a 10 percent stake in all businesses that exploit natural resources in their respective areas.

So far, three initiatives have been launched.

These are Unki Mine, which presented a US$10 million cheque to the community and a certificate for the 10 percent stake in its mines, Zimplats, which launched the Mhondoro, Chegutu and Zvimba CSOS/T in October and Schweppes, which launched the Employee and Management Share Ownership Trust in Harare last week. Under the Trust, workers own 51 percent of the company while Delta, the parent company retains 49 percent.

President Mugabe also urged Zimbabweans to work together and remain united in the spirit of the 1987 Unity Accord signed between PF-Zapu and Zanu.

He said Zimbabwe was a country with diverse tribes and urged people to respect each other and desist from perpetrating divisions.

He said different tribes had a common ideology and unity of purpose when they fought during the liberation struggle.

“The struggle we fought was a Zimbabwean struggle. We were all equal and we had a common denominator. This common denominator refuses that one tribe should dominate others,” said President Mugabe.

He, however, said belonging to a tribe and celebrating one’s cultural identity was in itself healthy as it demonstrated the diversity of the people in the country.

“What they do in Plumtree, in Kezi or in Beitbridge is their culture. Let us bring that diversity together. We should remain united today and tomorrow. Sisonke, simunye.”

President Mugabe took the huge crowd attending his photographic exhibition down memory lane as he narrated his history and how he assumed the leadership of the party and the Government.

He said he has learnt that leadership was all about putting people first and listening to their wishes.

“Pictures are necessary as well as our deeds of the past but the present must be taken seriously. The youth should always know that as the leaders we always regarded the people’s interests.

“No one should think he is the authority or kingmaker. Our revolution should give us a sense of humility. As a leader you must obey the people and be part of the people. The people, the people, the people. We considered the land issue as paramount during the Lancaster House Conference and that is why we had a deadlock in our initial talks until the whites agreed to give us back the land. That is what we fought for,” said President Mugabe.

He said the exhibition has reminded him of his past years and commended the Friends of Joshua Trust for organising the event, which he described as an overwhelming presentation.

President Mugabe urged the youths to do more research about the history of the country and reflect the truth about the country’s revolutionary path.

DAMASCUS, – The Syrian Communist Party (Unified) on Wednesday denounced the United States’ prompting armed groups to continue committing murders and not surrender their weapons after the amnesty announced by the government for those who turn in their weapons to the Syria authorities as long as they haven’t committed murder.

In a statement, the party said that the inflammatory US stance reaffirms the US administration’s involvement in the events taking place in Syria.

The statement also underlined the importance of the agreement between the Syrian government and the Arab initiative, saying that this inspired optimism among Syrians since it allows for adopting dialogue a political solution and restoring stability and calm to areas witnessing violence.

The party affirmed that the biggest hurdle before the implementation of the agreement is the stances of the armed group that reject dialogue entirely and the opposition abroad which promotes foreign interference, while Syrian national opposition welcomed the idea of dialogue.

The statement concluded by affirming that the party and the Syrian people support any Arab effort that stops bloodshed and consecrates the principle of national dialogue, affirming that the Syrian people will confront any attempt at foreign interference in Syria’s internal affairs.

We hear from the Colombian oligarchy and its generals the official announcement of the death of comrade and commander Alfonso Cano. Their guffaws and enthusiastic toasts still resound. All of the voices of the Establishment agree that this means the end of the guerrilla struggle in Colombia.

The only reality that symbolizes the death in combat of comrade Alfonso Cano, is the immortal strength of the Colombian people, who would rather die than live on their knees begging. The story of the struggles of this people is full of martyrs, women and men who never let their arm be twisted in the pursuit of equality and justice.

This will be neither the first time that the oppressed and exploited in Colombia are mourning one of its greatest leaders, nor the first they replace this mourning with the courage and absolute conviction of victory. Peace in Colombia will not be born from any guerrilla demobilization, but from the abolition of the causes that give rise to the uprising. There is a policy laid out and that is the one that shall continue.

Comrade and Commander Alfonso Cano has died. He has fallen most fervently convinced of the need for a political solution and for peace. Long live the memory of commander Alfonso Cano!

BOGOTA, Nov. 5 (Xinhua) — The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) said Saturday that despite the death of its top leader Alfonso Cano it would continue its guerrilla struggle and not give in to the government’s demand to surrender its weapons.

In a brief statement posted on the website of the New Colombia News Agency, the guerrilla group said that “the only reality that symbolizes the death in combat of comrade Alfonso Cano is the immortal strength of the Colombian people.”

Guillermo Leon Saenz, known within rebel ranks as “Alfonso Cano,” was killed Friday in a clash with government troops in the jungle near Suarez city in southwestern Cauca province. Two other rebels were also killed.

FARC is Colombia’s largest rebel group and has been at war with the government since its establishment in 1964. FARC’s leaders declined Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos’s offer to hand over their weapons and return to civilian life.

“Peace in Colombia will not be born in any guerrilla demobilization, but in the abolition of the causes that give rise to the uprising,” said the statement, which closed with a tribute to Cano.

The statement did not name Cano’s successor. According to intelligence information, the two most likely candidates are Luciano Marin, also known as “Ivan Marquez,” and Rodrigo Londono, also known as “Timoleon Jimenez.”

Cano, 63, became the leader of the illegal armed organization in 2008 after the death of FARC’s commander and founder Pedro Nel Marin.

Pyongyang, October 18 (KCNA) — The working masses’ struggle against capitalism was staged all at once across the world on Oct. 15 and 16. This was the biggest organized one ever in history of capitalism spanning more than 300 years.

Taking part in it were millions of people from all walks of life in more than 1 500 cities in 80 odd countries.

This struggle was erupted at Wall Street in Manhattan of New York in the United States, the heart of the capitalist economy and a synonym for monopolistic capital on Sept. 17. Under the slogan of “Occupy Wall Street!” dozens of protestors set up tents outside a stock exchange in New York to go into an action of protest. This turned in a twinkle to a chain movement across the U.S. including Washington, Boston, Los Angeles and San Francisco.

The Occupy Wall St movement was an eruption of the exploited classes’ pent-up wrath at the exploiters. It was also an expression of the will to remove the stronghold of capitalism as a whole which brings only exploitation, oppression, unemployment and poverty to the popular masses. In San Diego, California, a man in his forties jumped down from a high-rise building to death to protest against the corrupt society where the rich get ever richer and the poor get ever poorer.

Young Americans formed a mainstream of the ranks of demonstrators at first. But they were joined by people from all walks of life who varied in their ages including day laborers, poor and unemployed Americans as well as employees of companies and housewives.

Their actions included marches, sit-in strikes, occupation of bridges and various other forms of protests and non-stop protests at night.

The protesters are now expanding their ranks after setting forth such slogans clearer in nature as “equality, democracy and revolution”.

Ruling quarters in the U.S. are crying in distress that the “class struggle has been launched.” The authorities have arrested and cracked down upon the demonstrators with mobilization of huge armed police to soothe over the class contradiction but failed to check the spread of the struggle.

The U.S. chief executive formally recognized that this is a manifestation of feeling of frustration toward the U.S. society.

The American protestors set October 15 as “day of international movement”, calling on the working people the world over to respond to it.

In response to this call anti-capitalist demos took place all at once in Britain, Italy, Germany, Spain, France, Belgium, Australia, Japan, Philippines, Taiwan, etc. on October 15 and 16.

The protestors contended that the blame for the capitalist economic crisis is on the greedy financial capital and corrupt politicians. They demanded final end to poverty and economic inequality, chanting such slogans as “Reject capitalism!” and “Give us jobs!”

In south Korea more than 400 civic and public organizations and workers’ organizations launched protest, chanting “Occupy Seoul!”

These unprecedented actions of the working masses in capitalist countries are attributable to the extremely acute socio-class contradictions created after the outbreak of the global financial crisis in 2007.

Various relief measures taken by the Western countries after the financial crisis eruption were, in essence, for saving the huge monopolistic capitals on the maw of bankruptcy. Those steps deepened concentration of capital only on big monopolistic enterprises while bringing the popular masses’ life to worse phase.

Suffering biggest are working masses laid off due to the wholesale dismissal measure taken by the business side to make up for the loss.

401 000 people were registered as unemployed in the U.S. for first one week in October. The number of the unemployed reached 22 785 000 in EU countries in August.

The unemployment is bound to lead to the increase of the poor.

The number of people under poverty stood at 46.2 million last year, an increase of 2.6 million from the year before. The income of the U.S. families showed nearly 10 % decrease for the past four years. Economists estimate that the living conditions of Americans are the worst in scores of years and the economic slowdown has not stopped yet.

About 80 million people are living under the poverty line in EU countries.

Economist Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize winner, voicing his support for the protest sweeping the capitalist world, clarified that the society is covering the losses caused by the avarice of financial capitalists while a few bankers are raking in the profits.

]]>https://marxistleninist.wordpress.com/2011/10/19/democratic-korea-in-solidarity-with-occupy-movement/feed/0comradezerodprk-rally1Who are the one percent?https://marxistleninist.wordpress.com/2011/10/16/who-are-the-one-percent/
https://marxistleninist.wordpress.com/2011/10/16/who-are-the-one-percent/#commentsSun, 16 Oct 2011 21:53:11 +0000http://marxistleninist.wordpress.com/?p=6682Continue reading →]]>The following article by Masao Suzuki is the first in a three article series from Fight Back! News:

Occupy Boston march, Oct. 10. (Fight Back! News/Staff)

Across the country, the movement sparked by Occupy Wall Street has caught fire. This movement, identified by the slogan, “We are the 99%” targets the 1% of rich and powerful who are running the country for their interests and profit, at the expense of the rest of us who face high unemployment, lower wages, soaring tuition costs, home foreclosures and lack of affordable health insurance. In addition, servants of Wall Street are pushing to dismantle Social Security and Medicare and to raise taxes on the poor while cutting taxes even more on the rich. They say that they have no money, but are sending bombers and troops to more and more countries, so that military spending is now the single largest expense of the federal government, costing more than $800 billion a year.

So who are the 1%? The movement has targeted Wall Street, and indeed, before the recession and financial crisis, the financial industry was making 40% of profits of big corporations. But while the pain inflicted by Wall Street on the housing market (while getting bailed out itself) is historic, corporations across the board have shifted jobs to other countries (cutting some 4 million jobs in the United States while creating 3 million in other countries) and amassed some $2 trillion dollars in profits that they are not spending.

While there are millions of small businesses that are owned and operated by a single person, these small businesses only do about 5% of all sales in the economy. On the other hand, corporations make up only 10% of all businesses but do more than three-quarters of all sales. An even smaller group of less than 1000 big corporations with sales of more than $2.5 billion each make up half of all sales in the economy. The domination of the economy by a small number of giant for-profit corporations is what is called “monopoly capitalism.“

The most common yardstick of one’s position in the economy is income. The U.S. Census Bureau, the government agency in charge of collecting statistics, does not report much on people with very high incomes. They do say that households making more than $250,000 in income make up 2.1% of all households, but this is a much broader group than the top 1%.The Internal Revenue Service did report that the wealthiest 1% of taxpayers had an Adjusted Gross Income of $380,000 in 2010. So one way to define the top 1% would be those making more than $400,000.

But there are problems with using income to define the top 1%. For example, many professional football players make more than $400,000 a year. But on average, they only play three and a half seasons, so their high incomes are temporary. In addition, studies show that the average pro football player only lives 52 years, some 25 years less than the average American male. So they are making a sacrifice that the real rich and powerful don’t make. In contrast, oil billionaire John Rockefeller lived to be 98 and billionaire investor Warren Buffett is still going strong at 81. Last, and perhaps most importantly, last year the football owners locked out the players in a dispute over pay and working conditions, showing the power of the wealthy individuals who own the teams over their highly paid employees.

A better measure of economic power is wealth. Wealth can be more long-lasting than income, and can be passed from parents to children, unlike income. Finally, wealth gives economic power and control, as opposed to income, which allows one to buy more, but doesn’t give one economic power. Those whose wealth controls the big corporations who dominate the economy are the“monopoly capitalists.”

According to the IRS estimates based on estate taxes, there were about 2.2 million people, or about 1% of the adult population, whose net worth was $1.5 million or more in 2004. Net worth is a measure of wealth that takes a person’s total assets (home, real estate, stock, bonds, businesses, retirement savings, etc.) and subtracts all debts (mortgages, credit card, etc.). This top 1% owned almost $3.3 trillion in stocks, or more than half of the $6 trillion in stock owned by households that year. This means that the top 1% controlled the big corporations that dominate the economy.

An earlier study by economist Edward Wolff, based on statistics from the Federal Reserve Bank’s “Survey of Consumer Finances,” showed that the top 1% owned 47% of the net financial wealth (stocks, bonds, and businesses but not cars and home equity) in 1998. Wolff found that the concentration of wealth was increasing during the 1980s and 1990s, hand in hand with the increasing concentration of income as the rich got richer and the poor got poorer.

The rich not only control the corporations, but also the government. Over 40% of congress people, a majority of senators (54 out of 100), and three of the last four presidents were millionaires (and the only one who wasn’t, Bill Clinton, is a millionaire now), far more than the 4 to 5% of households with net worth of more than a million dollars estimated by Wolff. In addition, campaign contributions from the rich and corporate elite, combined with the influence of lobbyists who work for them, make sure that only those who serve the elite can be elected to high political office.

The electoral system as a whole is stacked against working people. Both major parties, the Republicans and the Democrats, are parties of the rich. The Occupy Wall Street movement, by breaking away from the confines of our two-party political system and appealing directly to the people, offers real hope for a mass movement that can beat back the right-wing and corporate attacks on our jobs, homes, schools and social programs.

Protestors shout slogans during a rally outside Houston's City Hall Thursday, Oct. 6, 2011. Hundreds of protesters took to the streets in Dallas, Houston and Austin on Thursday as cities around Texas joined the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations demanding an end to corruption in politics and business. (AP Photo/Pat Sullivan)

On Sept. 30, the Economic Cycle Research Institute (ECRI) publicly stated that the United States economy was tipping into a new recession. This adds to the growing evidence of a serious slowdown in the U.S. economy, including the zero job growth and falling personal income in August as well as falling prices and sales of homes in August.

Republican presidential candidates have taken the free market view that the government is to blame for economic instability and have called for, for example, dismantling the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as a ‘job-killer.’ Unfortunately Democratic politicians from President Obama to California Governor Brown have also adopted this view of sacrificing the health and welfare of people in the interests of corporate profits.

These right-wing, free market views even go as far as trying to blame the boom and bust in housing prices on government-backed mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie. In fact, the big boom in housing was driven by Wall Street and big banks that pushed risky and exotic mortgages from 2003 to 2007 while pushing Fannie and Freddie to the sidelines. The right wing also tries to put blame for the housing crisis on federal government efforts to increase homeownership among African Americans and other oppressed nationalities under the Democratic Clinton administration, when the big boom and bust came under Republican George Bush.

Backers of the free market view are calling for more austerity. Republican presidential candidates complain that the poor, working parents and seniors on Social Security often pay no income tax, while ignoring the payroll and sales taxes that lower income folks pay. Free marketers claim that extending unemployment insurance benefits causes unemployment by reducing people’s interest in finding a job, ignoring the fact that there are almost four people looking for a job for every job opening. They have also proposed at different times to do away with Social Security and Medicare and turning people’s retirement funds over to Wall Street and health care to private insurance companies.

Keynesian economists such as Nobel-prize winner Paul Krugman have argued that these policies of austerity are cruel and that the federal government should have spent even more, as the $800 billion economic stimulus under Obama barely offset the spending cuts and tax increases by state and local government, adding little stimulus to the economy. They correctly point out that the large U.S. government budget deficits have not increased interest rates, as the interest rate on long-term government bonds have dropped to the lowest levels in 70 years.

But the example of Japan shows that even massive government spending can fail to revive an economy. In the early 1990s the Japanese economy suffered a triple whammy of recession, a stock market crash and a bursting real estate bubble. The Japanese government borrowed and spent huge amounts, driving Japanese government debt from the lowest among the wealthier nations to the highest – it is now more than twice the size of the Japanese economy (in contrast, the U.S. government’s debt is still smaller than our economic production as measured by GDP). Nevertheless, the Japanese economy has remained in the doldrums, with only a strong export sector boosting the economy.

Marxist economics sees recession as neither caused by the government nor as curable by government spending. Rather, recessions are part and parcel of a capitalist economy where profit is the motive force. Businesses cut workers’ pay and benefits to increase their profits. But this limits their workers’ ability to buy back what they create. At the same time, these profits are reinvested in developing new technologies and expanding production. This clash – between limited ability to buy and growing ability to produce – leads to periodic crisis of overproduction, or what are called recessions.

Over the last 30 years a vast expansion of debt, especially credit cards and mortgages, has allowed workers to buy more and more despite having stagnant wages. At the same time it has been a profitable investment for capital that has had a hard time finding enough productive investments to turn a profit. But this pile of debt began to collapse with the financial crisis triggered by the collapse of the Wall Street investment bank three years ago.

Without more and more debt to stimulate the economy, it should be no surprise that the recovery from the last recession has been so weak. More than two years after the official end of the last recession, there are almost 7 million fewer jobs than before the recession started and many parts of the country are still mired in depression. More frequent recessions and quite likely worse ones are in the near future, as governments lose their will to bail out the economy and austerity measures cut spending.

The ultimate solution is that we need socialism, which includes an economy based on people’s needs, not profit. But in the meantime we also need to build a mass movement to defend the unions and social programs that have helped people raise their standard of living. Instead of cutting Medicare, we need a national health insurance program for all. Instead of cutting Social Security, we need to restore Social Security taxes on higher income individuals. Instead of closing schools and raising tuition at public colleges, the U.S. must get out of Iraq and Afghanistan.

]]>https://marxistleninist.wordpress.com/2011/10/07/united-states-entering-a-new-recession/feed/0comradezeroWall Street Protests TexasRobert Mugabe on Libya, Colonialism, and NATO Aggressionhttps://marxistleninist.wordpress.com/2011/09/25/robert-mugabe-on-libya-colonialism-and-nato-aggression/
https://marxistleninist.wordpress.com/2011/09/25/robert-mugabe-on-libya-colonialism-and-nato-aggression/#commentsSun, 25 Sep 2011 16:58:34 +0000http://marxistleninist.wordpress.com/?p=6677Continue reading →]]>President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe’s speech at the 66th general assembly meeting in the United Nations in which he condemns the aggressive approach towards Libya, violating the UN-Charter and ignoring the peaceful attempts for negotiations and ceasefires proposed by the African Union.
]]>https://marxistleninist.wordpress.com/2011/09/25/robert-mugabe-on-libya-colonialism-and-nato-aggression/feed/1comradezeroStand against repression, drop the charges against Carlos Montes and prepare for more challenges aheadhttps://marxistleninist.wordpress.com/2011/09/22/stand-against-repression-drop-the-charges-against-carlos-montes-and-prepare-for-more-challenges-ahead/
https://marxistleninist.wordpress.com/2011/09/22/stand-against-repression-drop-the-charges-against-carlos-montes-and-prepare-for-more-challenges-ahead/#commentsFri, 23 Sep 2011 00:35:57 +0000http://marxistleninist.wordpress.com/?p=6674Continue reading →]]>

On Sept. 24, 2010 the FBI launched a series of coordinated raids against anti-war and international solidarity activists in the Midwest. More than 70 agents of the FBI, ATF and Joint Terrorism Task Force were involved. Also raided that day was the office of the Twin Cities Anti-War Committee. In concert with the raids, the FBI made attempts to intimidate activists in California, North Carolina and Wisconsin.

That day, the authorities started the process of serving subpoenas for activists to appear in front of a Chicago-based Grand Jury. Subpoenas mounted in the days and months following – until a total of 23 activists were ordered to appear in front of the grand jury witch hunt headed by U.S Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald. Simultaneously, more FBI ‘visits’ took place in the Midwest and Southwest.

In November and December 2010, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Illinois made threats against three anti-war activists from the Twin Cities, telling them in no uncertain terms: Cooperate with the prosecution – or else.

Then on May 17, 2011 the attack was extended to veteran Chicano leader Carlos Montes, whose home was raided by the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department. The raid was an initiative of the FBI, who tried to question Montes about Freedom Road Socialist Organization. He is now facing up to 18 years in jail on a false pretext of firearm charges.

All of the above is well known to those who have followed this case, and much of it has been covered, at times extensively, in the national and international press. That said, it is important to recall just how large this assault has been to date, if we are to understand the gravity of the situation in the future.

Get ready for more storms ahead

While the future is unwritten, every progressive person should understand there is a real danger of more attacks in the coming period. The U.S. Attorney Office in Chicago has told lawyers for the activists to expect multiple indictments of multiple people. A number of the activists have had their passports seized. Very little of the property that was taken away on Sept. 24 has been returned.

For two years before the raids, an undercover law enforcement officer going by the name “Karen Sullivan” invested thousands of hours into spying on, and lying about, those targeted in this investigation.

The violent attack on the home of Carlos Montes and the ongoing attempt to put him in prison underscore the need to take the government’s threats seriously.

A powerful resistance

The repression is one side of the coin. The other is the powerful response.

Even while the Sept. 24 raids were taking place, a strong, broad and multifaceted pushback was underway. Activists whose homes were still full of FBI agents gave interviews to the media. Within hours, press conferences and demonstrations were underway to demand, “Hands off anti-war and international solidarity activists.” In the days following the raids more than 60 demonstrations took place around the county. In past year, there were waves of protests, nationally and internationally, at every important juncture in the case – of special importance are the actions responding to the attempt to jail Carlos Montes.

The foundation of this response resides in this fact: In the face of immense pressure and real danger, not one of the activists who was called to grand jury agreed to go. And no one cooperated with the FBI. The lesson is simple; those who stand up and do the right thing will find support.

Likewise the approach of uniting all who can be united was and is vital in building a broad defense. As it is, thousands of people in the anti-war, Palestine and Latin America solidarity, and other progressive movements have spoken out against this repression. So have trade unions, civil rights organizations and some members of congress. More than 50 communist and workers parties from Cuba to Democratic Korea have condemned these attacks.

Anyone who holds that people have the right to organize, speak out and to from political associations has a place in this movement to defend everyone’s democratic rights.

A clear agenda

It’s clear that that the FBI, the misnamed U.S. ‘Justice Department’ and the forces that pull their strings have an agenda.

Since the events of Sept. 11, 2001, a wave of repression has been unleashed on Arab and Muslim people in this country. This is an attempt to extend that attack. It is aimed at people who stand in solidarity with Palestine, including some who are Palestinian Americans.

It is an attempt to criminalize international solidarity. From Palestine to Colombia, people want to be free of oppression. It is a great thing that there are people in the United States who support these struggles. The U.S. government is treating solidarity as if it were a crime, while supporting death squad governments like Colombia. The U.S. military kills on a daily basis in Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia and many other countries. Yet our rulers have the nerve to turn around and say those who fight for freedom and independence are ‘terrorists.’ They are incapable of telling the truth; they make a practice of confounding right and wrong.

Another element is the anti-communist character of this attack, which takes aim at Freedom Road Socialist Organization. FBI documents discovered in a raided home in May 2011 read like something written by Joe McCarthy; “Who do you know? What do you talk about? Where do you hold meetings? Tell us about steps taken to overthrow the government.” It is like the calendar has been turned back 60 years.

We in the Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO) have long worked to build the anti-war and international solidarity movements. We are proud of the work we have done to stand with the people of Colombia, Palestine, the Philippines and other countries who are fighting to free themselves from U.S. domination. It is no surprise that among the activists who were raided, subpoenaed and questioned, there were members of the FRSO who are longtime anti-war and international solidarity activists, as well as others who are active in the labor movement and the oppressed nationality communities.

Seize the time

The time is now to defeat those who want to jail activists, organizers and leaders of the people’s struggle who are standing up for what is just.

A sense of urgency is needed. All of those targeted have made real contributions to making this world a better place to live. They have done nothing wrong.

Carlos Montes is facing a very long time in prison. He is 64 years old and has devoted the whole of his life to the liberation of the Chicano people and working and oppressed people everywhere. Every effort must be made to keep him free.

The months ahead are critical. The enemies of freedom are strong. We need to be stronger. Let’s lift our voices to demand an end to the repression. The time has come to fight back!

]]>https://marxistleninist.wordpress.com/2011/09/22/stand-against-repression-drop-the-charges-against-carlos-montes-and-prepare-for-more-challenges-ahead/feed/2comradezero269457_2155769850382_1130537687_2522924_7500031_nU.S. economic stagnation continues three years after financial crisis of 2008: Working people need to fight back against austerityhttps://marxistleninist.wordpress.com/2011/09/12/u-s-economic-stagnation-continues-three-years-after-financial-crisis-of-2008-working-people-need-to-fight-back-against-austerity/
https://marxistleninist.wordpress.com/2011/09/12/u-s-economic-stagnation-continues-three-years-after-financial-crisis-of-2008-working-people-need-to-fight-back-against-austerity/#commentsTue, 13 Sep 2011 02:25:47 +0000http://marxistleninist.wordpress.com/?p=6672Continue reading →]]>The following editorial is from Fight Back! News:

The U.S. economy continues to stagnate with almost no economic growth or job creation more than three years after the great financial crisis of 2008 and more than two years after the recession officially ended in 2009. The official unemployment rate is still over 9% nationally, and millions of workers who have stopped looking for work are not included in this count. Even worse, the Obama administration projects unemployment to stay above 8% for all of 2012, which would be four years of near double-digit unemployment.

The U.S. is not the first to face economic stagnation. In the 1980s, European unemployment rates were also near double-digit levels. U.S. economists blamed this on the European social-welfare state, with universal health insurance and unemployment insurance, early retirement and long paid maternity leaves. But here in the United States more than 50 million people have no health insurance at all, millions of unemployed have no benefits, the retirement age is rising and there is no mandatory paid maternity leave. Still, the U.S. economy stagnates.

In the 1990s, the Japanese economy entered what is now 20 years of stagnation, marked by deflation or falling prices. Deflation can poison an economy as prices and incomes fall, making it harder to pay off mortgages and other debts. As more and more loans go bad, the economy is dragged down even more. Again, U.S. economists blamed the Japanese Central Bank for not printing enough money to prevent deflation and stagnation. Here in the United States, the U.S. central bank, the Federal Reserve, has printed more than a trillion and a half dollars over the last three years, yet was able to stop the deflation in 2009. But still the U.S. economy stagnates.

The problem here in the United States (as well as Europe and Japan, which also have economies that are going from bad to worse) is not the limited social safety net or central bank policy. The problem is that our monopoly capitalist economy, dominated by a smaller and smaller number of gigantic corporation and Wall Street financial institutions, is dedicated to increasing profits at all costs. Over the last two years corporate profits have soared to record levels, while at the same time there are 7 million fewer people working than when the recession began in late 2007. These gigantic profits are not reinvested to create more jobs, but rather are flowing to the financial casino known as Wall Street for massive speculation.

Republicans are trying to use the continuing economic stagnation to try to eliminate what is left of the U.S. safety net. In Congress, Republicans have proposed to end Medicare and replace it with more expensive private health insurance. The leading Republican presidential candidate, Texas Governor Rick Perry, is attacking Social Security and wants retirees to depend on Wall Street. In states such as Wisconsin, Republicans have led the charge to chop pay, retirement, and collective bargaining rights of teachers and other government workers. They are also leading efforts in Arizona, Georgia and other states to scapegoat immigrants and pass racist laws targeting Chicanos and Latinos. These efforts are backed by the Koch oil billionaires and others who want corporations to be able to run amuck over working people and the environment.

The Democrats also have close ties with Wall Street, and spearheaded the bailout of big banks and corporations during the financial crisis. But to bring along their supporters among working people, African Americans, and other oppressed nationality communities, the Democrats have promoted programs that have been at best too little and too late and at worst crumbs compared to the hundreds of billions spent on corporate bailouts. While millions of home owners have been foreclosed and millions more have gone underwater – with their prices falling below their mortgages – the Obama Home Ownership Modification Program (HAMP) has only helped 63,000 severely underwater homeowners.

The latest Obama proposal for payroll tax cuts and extending unemployment insurance could add 2 million jobs if all of it is passed (there is almost zero chance of this happening with the Republican controlled Congress). With the labor force down by 7 million jobs since the recession started, this is still not enough to restore the economy to full employment.

Both the Republicans and the Democrats support continuing costly wars abroad. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have cost over a trillion dollars and counting, while the U.S. military is attacking Pakistan, Libya, and Yemen with bombs and drones. Trillions more have been spent on military bases, naval fleets and nuclear weapons so the United States is spending more than the rest of the world combined on the military. In the meantime college tuition is up, K-12 teachers are being laid off, roads and bridges are crumbling and even disaster relief is being questioned in Congress.

Both the Republicans and Democrats have committed themselves to cutting the federal budget deficit. But this is not going to help the economy; just look at what is happening in Europe where efforts by countries to cut spending and budget deficits are just leading to more and more unemployment and suffering by working people.

Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats will restore the economy to health. The Republican austerity proposals will only make the economy worse and deepen the suffering of working people. The Democratic practice of big bailouts for banks and corporate America combined with big announcements of programs to help working people that turn out to be little more than the status quo only serve to make the rich richer while trying to keep the poor and working people quiet.

Only a grassroots movement to fight back against austerity and for real relief for working people can protect our livelihoods and communities. We need a real government jobs programs that can put millions of unemployed to work like the WPA in the 1930s. We need to allow homeowners to reduce their mortgages and keep their homes through bankruptcy courts. We need to defend and expand Medicare, to provide universal health insurance for all and eliminate costly private health insurance. We need to defend Social Security and pensions so that working people can retire with peace of mind. Neither the Republicans nor Democrats will do the job if left in the clutches of Wall Street and billionaires. Only a massive fight back can force Congress and the administration to provide the jobs, education and services that working people need.

Now that ten years are passed since the events of Sept. 11, 2001, we would do well to look back and take note of some of the causes and consequences. We need to sum up and draw lessons. Immediately following the attacks in New York and at the Pentagon, the Bush administration began cynically manipulating events to launch an expansive and ongoing war on the peoples of the world and an escalating campaign of repression here at home under the guise of a ‘war on terror.’ This two-pronged approach to reasserting the power of the U.S. empire at the expense of working and oppressed people is continuing, and in some ways accelerating under the Obama administration.

On the heels of the attacks on 9/11, the U.S. launched its criminal war in Afghanistan in October with the stated purpose of hunting down Osama Bin Laden. They launched their bombing campaign in the face of Taliban leader Mullah Omar’s expressed willingness to cooperate in capturing Bin Laden. Come October 2011, this war will have dragged on for a decade, costing nearly $500 billion and the lives of 1670 U.S. troops, with tens of thousands of Afghans killed and seriously injured.

The illegal war in Iraq was instigated by Bush’s lies regarding Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. In the political climate following 9/11, the corporate media supported and parroted whatever the White House and Pentagon said. The U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq cost $800 billion, the lives of 1.4 million Iraqis, more than 4000 U.S. troops dead and more than 100,000 wounded. It is noteworthy that more than 300 times as many deaths occurred in these two wars than in the 9/11 attacks. Likewise, since 9/11, under the guise of the ‘war on terror,’ the U.S. has expanded wars and interventions in Colombia, the Philippines, Palestine, Yemen, Syria, Pakistan, Sudan and elsewhere.

Most recently, the U.S./NATO attacked Libya, seeking to establish a firm foothold in North Africa. All of these wars and interventions are about nothing more than strengthening the power of U.S. imperialism and of lining the pockets of the U.S. ruling class with the spoils of war in the form of oil and other natural resources. For the people of these countries, it means war, occupation and repression, along with the complete violation of their national sovereignty.

All the while, the people of the world, from Afghanistan and Libya, to Colombia and the Philippines continue to fight for self-determination and national liberation. We in Freedom Road Socialist Organization, along with progressive people everywhere, support them with the knowledge that our struggles are linked. The U.S. ruling class, oppressor of nations all over the world, likewise stands on the backs of working and oppressed people here. While the economic depression creates havoc at home for working people, the rich and powerful act as war criminals overseas.

The U.S. government was quick to shift public opinion in its favor following the Sept. 11 attacks. Bush’s “with us or against us” mentality left no room for sane discussion in the mainstream media. This fueled the fire for the notorious Patriot Acts that were quickly pushed through as part of the package deal of repression and war. As a result, an era of state terror against Arabs and Muslims began. Tens of thousands of Arabs and Muslims were subject to ‘special registration,’ put on no-fly lists, placed under surveillance and persecuted by the U.S.’s racist response to 9/11.

Not long after, it became clear that the web of domestic spying was being widened to include the progressive and anti-war communities generally. We understand this particularly well since the law enforcement officer “Karen Sullivan” infiltrated Freedom Road Socialist Organization, along with other groups we are active in, in the build up to the 2008 Republican National Convention in Minnesota. This infiltration led to the FBI raids on the homes and offices of 11 activists on Sept. 24, 2010, subpoenaing them to testify in a grand jury investigation concerning alleged “material support for terrorism.” Today, a total of 24 activists are targets of the investigation, with the threat of indictments looming.

U.S. imperialism is in decline, and the rich and powerful are growing more desperate by the day. As we said in our 2010 Main Political Report, “The ‘war on terror’ launched by the Bush administration was a dramatic attempt by the rulers of the United States to counteract the long running decline of Wall Street’s empire, by using military means. It ended in a series of defeat and stalemates, causing the phrase ‘war on terror’ to be quietly dropped from the Pentagon’s lexicon. The result is that on every continent, the U.S. finds itself struggling to find the methods and forms to maintain its domination, in the context of a declining ability to do so.”

The tragedy of 9/11 happened as a direct consequence of U.S. imperialist policy around the world. As long as these policies, which are part and parcel to the capitalist system itself, are allowed to continue, we will see further tragedy. The U.S. government repression, resulting from the cynical manipulation of this tragedy, has come down on FRSO and our friends because we have steadfastly resisted the ongoing wars and repression, both here and around the world. Likewise people around the world are continuing to fight back against the forces of empire. Despite all of the obstacles that face us in the days, months and years to come, we will continue to resist with all our might until, through mass struggle, a new era of peace, justice and equality is won.

]]>https://marxistleninist.wordpress.com/2011/09/09/frso-statement-september-11-ten-years-later/feed/1comradezerous-imperialism-latuff-latin-america-racismCPGB-ML report from June delegation to Libyahttps://marxistleninist.wordpress.com/2011/08/31/cpgb-ml-report-from-june-delegation-to-libya/
https://marxistleninist.wordpress.com/2011/08/31/cpgb-ml-report-from-june-delegation-to-libya/#commentsWed, 31 Aug 2011 20:02:31 +0000http://marxistleninist.wordpress.com/?p=6664Continue reading →]]>What follows is the report of a CPGB-ML led delegation to Libya in June 2011. What is the situation on the ground? Why should British, European and American workers support the Libyan people and their chosen leadership, Colonel Gaddafi’s government? Why should we oppose NATO? How is this linked with capitalist crisis and worker’s struggle for jobs, pensions and security?
]]>https://marxistleninist.wordpress.com/2011/08/31/cpgb-ml-report-from-june-delegation-to-libya/feed/1comradezeroU.S. / NATO attempt to occupy Tripoli, Libyans fight to maintain independencehttps://marxistleninist.wordpress.com/2011/08/24/u-s-nato-attempt-to-occupy-tripoli-libyans-fight-to-maintain-independence/
https://marxistleninist.wordpress.com/2011/08/24/u-s-nato-attempt-to-occupy-tripoli-libyans-fight-to-maintain-independence/#respondThu, 25 Aug 2011 02:41:02 +0000http://marxistleninist.wordpress.com/?p=6661Continue reading →]]>The following editorial is from Fight Back! News:

As the US/NATO-led rebel forces assault the Libyan capital of Tripoli, it is important for antiwar and progressive forces to recognize a few key points. The development of events since the popular North African revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt led to some divisions among progressive forces as the imperialist countries maneuvered to take control of the situation and develop contradictions in North Africa in their favor. In Libya the U.S., France, the U.K., and Italy joined together to take advantage of the discontent among certain sections of the Libyan people, and thereby develop an armed rebel movement to topple the Gaddafi government. This criminal action taken by US and NATO forces should be condemned by all people of conscience. The success of the NATO-led rebels would certainly mean an end to an independent Libya.

The Freedom Road Socialist Organization pointed out some of the contradictions at work in a statement on March 17, the day of the UN Security Council vote to intervene in Libya: “Since day one of the crisis in Libya, the corporate media has been in motion, preparing public opinion for war with Libya. Likewise, since the beginning of the crisis, the western, imperialist powers have been maneuvering militarily to take advantage of the situation. Meanwhile, it is clear that the rebels in Libya are not of one mind. Some of their leaders are tied to the old CIA-funded National Front for the Salvation of Libya, which would like to see Libya’s oil industry completely privatized, meaning an end to the current free health care and free education programs enjoyed by the Libyan people. Some are monarchists and others who wish to turn back the clock on Libyan social progress. Undoubtedly, war with Libya will mean the most reactionary forces among the rebels coming to power if Gaddafi’s government is defeated by the guns and bombs of the west.” We are now seeing this nightmare approaching reality.

The reasons behind this war are both economic and geostrategic. On the one hand, the Western powers wish to divide among themselves Libya’s vast oil wealth, the greatest in Africa. “We don’t have a problem with Western countries like the Italians, French and UK companies. But we may have some political issues with Russia, China and Brazil,” Abdeljalil Mayouf, information manager at Libyan rebel oil firm AGOCO, told Reuters. The National Transitional Council led by Mustafa Abdel-Jalil has likewise been clear that it wants very much to align itself with the U.S. and the other Western powers. On the other hand, the Western powers want to strengthen their dominance in the region, which is threatened by the political unrest that has swept North Africa and the Middle East since the beginning of the “Arab Spring”. If US/NATO forces are successful in Libya, they will be in a much better position step up their attempts to topple the government of Syria.

To give cover to this war of aggression and domination, they are cynically manipulating the political discontent of a section of the Libyan people, and utilizing bought and paid for puppets. And yet despite the intense attacks, including thousands of bombing raids, drone attacks, commando operations, and global economic sanctions, the patriotic people alongside Gaddafi’s government have resisted heroically and will certainly continue to do so. That they have held on for as long as they have is a tribute to the Libyans’ will to fight, their tenacity in the face of adversity, and the real commitment to maintaining national independence.

This conflict has now sharpened to the utmost degree, and at this point it must be clear that there are but two sides. On one side stand the forces of colonial domination, represented by all the might of the great powers–the U.S., the U.K, France and Italy. On the other side stands all who steadfastly oppose the forces of Empire. Despite whatever strengths of weaknesses the patriotic forces in Libya may have, progressive people everywhere should stand on the side of an independent Libya, for self-determination and against national oppression and domination.

]]>https://marxistleninist.wordpress.com/2011/08/24/u-s-nato-attempt-to-occupy-tripoli-libyans-fight-to-maintain-independence/feed/0comradezerolibyan-opposition-bannerLudo Martens, founder of the Workers’ Party of Belgium, has passed awayhttps://marxistleninist.wordpress.com/2011/06/07/ludo-martens-founder-of-the-workers-party-of-belgium-has-passed-away/
https://marxistleninist.wordpress.com/2011/06/07/ludo-martens-founder-of-the-workers-party-of-belgium-has-passed-away/#commentsTue, 07 Jun 2011 18:50:04 +0000http://marxistleninist.wordpress.com/?p=6658Continue reading →]]>The following is from the Workers Party of Belgium:

In the early morning of 5 June 2011, after a long and lingering illness, Ludo Martens, former president of the Workers’ Party of Belgium, passed away.

Together with Paul Goossens and Walter De Bock, Ludo Martens was one of the better known student leaders of May 1968 in Belgium. He translated the worldwide progressive current at the universities into the foundation of the Student Trade Union Movement (SVB), developed solidarity with the equal rights movement of black people in the United States, resisted narrow nationalism and exerted efforts to enhance the movement of solidarity between students and workers.

In 1979, Ludo Martens was instrumental in founding the Workers’ Party of Belgium (WPB), born from the merger between the student movement and the workers’ movement in the turbulent 1970s. Ludo Martens helped to put the principle of « serve the people » into practice by actively stimulating Kris Merckx in setting up Medicine for the People. Today’s eleven people’s clinics of Medicine for the People, providing free health care to more than 25,000 patients, remain one of the WPB’s major achievements. Today, the WPB counts 4,500 members and has chapters in 30 cities and 120 workplaces all over Belgium.

Ludo Martens led the WPB until 1999. The last decade of his life he was mainly active in the Democratic Republic of Congo. With his writings about Congolese liberation fighters Patrice Lumumba, Pierre Mulele and Leonie Abo he wanted to support the progressive movement in Congo. Returning history to those who made it, as he would put it.

Today however, unfortunately, we have to return history itself to Ludo. Ludo Martens is survived by two children. On Sunday morning 26 June, a simple commemoration will take place in Brussels.

For a more complete overview of Ludo Martens’ life and work, read more here (in French).

]]>https://marxistleninist.wordpress.com/2011/06/07/ludo-martens-founder-of-the-workers-party-of-belgium-has-passed-away/feed/11comradezeroludo martensFRSO presentation to the 2011 International Communist Seminar in Brusselshttps://marxistleninist.wordpress.com/2011/06/07/frso-presentation-to-the-2011-international-communist-seminar-in-brussels/
https://marxistleninist.wordpress.com/2011/06/07/frso-presentation-to-the-2011-international-communist-seminar-in-brussels/#respondTue, 07 Jun 2011 05:30:02 +0000http://marxistleninist.wordpress.com/?p=6654Continue reading →]]>The following is the report from the Freedom Road Socialist Organization to the International Communist Seminar. The topic of the 2011 seminar was “The strengthening of communist parties in times of a deepening capitalist systemic crisis”:

Building A Communist Party in the United States, 2011

The Freedom Road Socialist Organization Faces U.S. State Repression

The Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO) is currently facing a campaign of repression by the United States government. On September 24, 2010, under orders from U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald in Chicago, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) raided homes and activist offices in Chicago, Illinois, and Minneapolis, Minnesota. 14 anti-war and international solidarity activists, including two in Michigan, were subpoenaed to appear at a secretive Grand Jury investigation. Nine more Palestine solidarity activists, most Arab-Americans, were subpoenaed to appear on January 25, 2011, bringing the total to 23. The 23 refuse to appear at the Grand Jury inquisition where U.S. Attorney Fitzgerald claims to investigate “material support for terrorism”, focused on the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). In actuality, the FRSO is the target of political repression by the U.S. government. Comrades are facing indictments, a trial, and possibly Federal prison. The main issues are free speech and the right to organize, recently narrowed by a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in the Holder vs. Humanitarian Law Project case. The trial will center around the testimony of a Federal Agent who infiltrated the mass groups and the FRSO.

The international solidarity activists and the FRSO have done nothing wrong and refuse to be criminalized. Threatened with fifteen-year and longer prison terms, the FRSO is fighting back by organizing a broad front opposed to war and political repression. In the face of U.S. government repression, the FRSO is attempting to unify in struggle all the forces, especially Arabs and Muslims, who are under attack from the U.S. legal system and repressive apparatus. While defense work is the main mass activity of the FRSO, the repression is bringing significant interest to our politics and organization, and providing new opportunities for party building.

The Freedom Road Socialist Organization is an anti-revisionist Marxist-Leninist group founded in 1985. As reported in our newspaper Fight Back! and at www.FRSO.org, the members of FRSO are very active in movements fighting for justice–particularly in labor, oppressed nationality, anti-war and anti-imperialist, and student movements. Our strategy for revolution is to form an alliance of the workers and oppressed nationalities movements, especially the African-American and Chicano national movements, led by a communist party to seize state power. We want the working class and its allies to rule society instead of the small class of wealthy elites. Our central task is to build a new Communist Party.

The FRSO 6th Congress

Six months prior to the FBI raids and Grand Jury repression, the FRSO held its 6th Congress, our most successful ever. We assessed that in the previous five years growth was faster than at any time since the group was founded. While most new recruits are students, some are workers. Prior to the raids, spirits were high and cadres were excited about recruiting to the FRSO and other aspects of party building.

In the context of the great economic crisis, the FRSO 6th Congress decided it was important to focus on fusion–the unity of the Marxist party and the working class movement. With the recruitment of many students, our policy is for them to concentrate in working class jobs, to transform their class and participate directly in the class struggle. Like other imperialist countries, the American communist movement is very swayed by petite-bourgeois and bourgeois ideology. Again and again, revisionism raises its ugly head. Disguised as “new thinking” or “fresh ideas”, the corruption of scientific socialism degenerates into reformism, and eventually into counter-revolutionary activity. Historically the Communist Party in the U.S. made a temporary comeback from the revisionist ideas known as Browderism and “American Exceptionalism”, only to take the path of revisionism in the late 1950’s again. As a new revolutionary movement swept the U.S. in the 1960’s and 1970’s, there was renewed interest in Marxism-Leninism and the New Communist Movement arose. In the 1980’s, as the period of struggle receded, many groups fractured, folded, or turned to reformism and Social Democracy.

Through the 1990’s, Marxist-Leninists in the FRSO argued polemics against the so-called “Left Refoundationism”, an Americanized Euro-communism. In 1999, the older folks adhering to “Left Refoundationism” held a split meeting. Other “rejectionists” soon followed, and the FRSO moved forward, re-affirming Marxism-Leninism with a stronger, highly unified core of leaders. The FRSO charted a revolutionary path and began to grow steadily. Today, the FRSO is able to attract and unite with Marxist-Leninists–both new ones and veterans from other parties and groups. Given the modest size of the revolutionary movement in the U.S., the FRSO is meeting with success in party building. While conditions and spontaneous struggles inside the U.S. provide many opportunities for revolutionaries, the state repression against FRSO is disruptive.

Current Conditions in the U.S. for Party Building

The United States is an imperialist state, the sole superpower today, ruled by a dangerous criminal class. This monopoly capitalist class seeks to dominate the world in pursuit of ever more profit. Currently the U.S. imperialists are confronted by the deepest economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930’s. They are gripped by the fear of losing their ill-gotten gains, blaming workers, teachers, immigrants and oppressed people for the crisis. The U.S. imperialists tremble in the face of powerful workers marches, peoples’ rebellions, and the coming revolutions around the world that threaten their ability to exploit labor and rob natural resources. The U.S. Empire is in crisis and its domination of whole regions like the Middle East and Latin America is threatened. White House strategists are scrambling to contend with and suppress the growing mass rebellions, national democratic movements and anti-imperialist governments, and armed revolutionary insurgencies led by communists. Country by country, the people’s movements are advancing, unity against imperialism is growing, the socialist countries are developing and strengthening, while revolutionary and communist parties deepen their ties to the masses and extend their influence.

Bailouts, Cutbacks, and Workers’ Struggle

In the U.S, the Federal government bailed out Wall Street and the Big Banks, giving away $700 billion in one day. Hundreds of billions more were spent in secretive bailouts, and the Federal Reserve (the U.S. central bank) flooded the financial system with more than a trillion dollars of cash. But once the worst of the crisis was over, there was a shift to put the burden of the economic crisis onto the working class. The Federal government is slashing funding, pushing the financial crisis down onto State governments. State Governors are pointing to the budget crisis and cutting workers jobs, lowering pay, and taking away benefits. The politicians give tax cut after tax cut to the wealthy capitalists and corporations, while slashing programs that benefit working people. Everyone knows where the money is though. It is sitting in the big banks and corporations who have more than a trillion dollars of profits that they are hoarding. So while the bosses make huge profits and take home millions of dollars in bonuses, the workers are made to pay for the capitalist system’s crisis. The bought and paid for politicians are implementing the austerity program of the billionaires and multi-millionaires. In Wisconsin, Governor Walker unleashed the biggest capitalist offensive against unions and the working class since before World War Two.

Due to the extreme attacks by the rich and powerful, the American workers movement has come alive again, starting in Madison, Wisconsin, but also in Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, and many other states. When Governor Walker and the Republican Party attacked the right to collective bargaining, union members saw themselves being made outlaws and mobilized by the tens of thousands to fight back and occupy the Wisconsin State Capitol building.

The Freedom Road Socialist Organization mobilized from around the Midwest to help take the protests as far as militants were willing to go. FRSO student and union cadre responded immediately, encouraging local union leaders to take to the streets with mass protest marches. In a good example, the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, in coalition with campus workers, graduate employees, and professors, led a walk out that 3000 joined, the largest mobilization since the Vietnam War protests. High school students walked out in small towns and big cities in support of their teachers, the unions, and their own education. Hundreds of schools closed as students and teachers rushed to the Capitol. The University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate teachers’ union occupied the State Capitol, and then public sector union members by the tens of thousands soon surrounded it. The FRSO mobilized union workers from Minneapolis, Minnesota and Chicago, Illinois to join the fight in Madison and other towns around Wisconsin. At the peak of the struggle, there were 150,000 workers, farmers, and their supporters chanting, “Kill the bill! Shut it down!”

For the first time in decades the possibility of a general strike was raised, but the leadership and conditions do not exist yet. It is also clear that the class-consciousness of American workers is rising due to the battle in Madison. The movement spread to a dozen states, from Illinois to New Jersey, and from Florida to California. Every week public sector protests are making national news.

Given its growth in capacity, the FRSO is able to position itself to support and sometimes lead major struggles of the workers and oppressed in the U.S. With cores of determined revolutionaries we are able to make an impact on the mass movements, sometimes nationwide. The FRSO does this by working well with others, and finding ways to persuade even the reluctant. The FBI raids and Grand Jury investigation by U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald is serious and threatening, but we have a historic task as Marxist-Leninists to live up to, and we have friends throughout the world who we are calling upon for solidarity!

Stop FBI raids!

Call off the Grand Jury!

Down with the new McCarthyism!

]]>https://marxistleninist.wordpress.com/2011/06/07/frso-presentation-to-the-2011-international-communist-seminar-in-brussels/feed/0comradezeroICS-2011_1600_x_1200Workers, communist parties declare solidarity with FRSO in fight against repressionhttps://marxistleninist.wordpress.com/2011/06/01/workers-communist-parties-declare-solidarity-with-frso-in-fight-against-repression/
https://marxistleninist.wordpress.com/2011/06/01/workers-communist-parties-declare-solidarity-with-frso-in-fight-against-repression/#commentsWed, 01 Jun 2011 11:52:48 +0000http://marxistleninist.wordpress.com/?p=6650Continue reading →]]>Fight Back News Service is circulating the following resolution adopted by workers and communist parties gathered at the International Communist Seminar in Brussels, Belgium, May 13-15. The statement expresses solidarity with Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO), along with other anti-war and international solidarity activists who are facing repression in the United States. The resolution was signed by 42 parties.

Resolution in solidarity with the Freedom Road Socialist Organization against new McCarthyism

The undersigned participating at the 20th International Communist Seminar in Brussels, Belgium, May 13-15, 2011, denounce the U.S. Government repression of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO), its leaders, and its allies in the anti-war and international solidarity movements.

The FRSO members are under attack due to their support for the struggles of the people of Palestine and Colombia. The FRSO members and friends are accused of “material support for terrorism” because they organize protest against U.S. wars for Empire in the Middle East, against U.S. aid to Israel, and against U.S. military intervention in Colombia. The U.S. Government is claiming the publishing of articles and opinions favorable to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) in the newspaper “Fight Back” constitutes a crime. We reject this criminalization of political speech and organizing.

We denounce the Federal Bureau of Investigation (F.B.I.) raids targeting the homes and offices of progressives and revolutionaries. We demand an end to secretive Grand Jury where there is no judge and activists are not even allowed a lawyer. We applaud the 23 solidarity activists’ refusal to appear and speak at the Grand Jury despite the threat of imprisonment.

As internationalists, we support organizing in solidarity with people and movements struggling against U.S. imperialism.